MEXICO: HURIWA urges Nigerian Women to galvanise support to win Presidency

Oru Leonard 

With the successful emergence of a lady, Ms. Claudia Sheinbaum, a climate scientist, as Mexico’s newly elected president, The Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria (HURIWA), has called on Nigerian women’s rights and political activists to galvanize popular support for a woman of sophisticated quality to ascend the presidency of Nigeria in the shortest possible time.

HURIWA lamented that Nigerian women appear to have given up on struggling to emerge as presidential candidates of frontline parties.

HURIWA recalled that Ms. Claudia Sheinbaum has been elected as Mexico’s first female president, in a historic landslide win for the first time in over 200 years.
Mexico’s official electoral authority said preliminary results showed the 61-year-old former mayor of Mexico City winning between 58% and 60% of the vote in Sunday’s election.
That gives her a lead of about 30 percentage points over her main rival, businesswoman Xóchitl Gálvez.
Ms Sheinbaum will replace her mentor, outgoing President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, on 1 October.

HURIWA noted that it is impressive that Ms Sheinbaum, a former energy scientist, has promised continuity, saying that she will continue to build on the “advances” made by Mr López Obrador, further building on the welfare programmes which have made the outgoing president very popular.
But in her victory speech she also highlighted what has set this Mexican election apart from previous ones. She told cheering voters: “For the first time in the 200 years of the [Mexican] Republic, I will become the first woman president of Mexico.”
She said it was an achievement not just for her but for all women.
“I’ve said it from the start, this is not just about me getting [to the top office], it’s about all of us getting here.”
She added: “I won’t fail you.”
Ms Sheinbaum also thanked her rival, Xóchitl Gálvez, who has conceded victory.

The Rights group stated that prior to running for president, Ms Sheinbaum was mayor of Mexico City, one of the most influential political positions in the country and one that is seen as paving the way for the presidency even as Ms Sheinbaum, whose Jewish maternal grandparents immigrated to Mexico from Bulgaria fleeing the Nazis, had an illustrious career as a scientist before delving into politics. Her paternal grandparents hailed from Lithuania.

The Rights group affirmed that the body of knowledge and experience the Mexico’s new president got, coupled with her student activism eventually earned her the position of secretary of the environment for Mexico City at the time when Andrés Manuel López Obrador was mayor of the capital.
In 2018 she became the first female mayor of Mexico City, a post she held until 2023, when she stepped down to run for president.

The election, which pitted Ms Sheinbaum against Ms Gálvez, has been described as a sea change for women in Mexico.
Edelmira Montiel, 87, said that she was grateful to be alive to see a woman elected to the top office.
“Before, we couldn’t even vote, and when you could, it was to vote for the person your husband told you to vote for. Thank God that has changed and I get to live it,” she told Reuters news agency, referring to the fact that women were only allowed to vote in national elections in 1953.

While the fact that the two front-runners were women was widely celebrated, the campaign was marred by violent attacks.
As well as a new president, voters were also electing all members of Mexico’s Congress and governors in eight states, the head of Mexico City’s government, and thousands of local officials.
And it was local candidates in particular who were targeted in the run-up to the vote.

HURIWA said historical facts supports the call for committed women political activists in Nigeria to build popular endorsement of Nigerian voters and political platforms so Nigeria’s political firmament would be predisposed to electing woman president going by the nexus between the emergence of the first woman president in Mexico in the last 200 years just like that Nigeris which for over half a century has failed to elect a woman president.

“We propose that mainstream, genuinely popular political parties should erect a workable framework for fast tracking the emergence of women contenders for the office of the president of Nigeria which is the largest black democracy in the world. Women of Nigeria are already calling the shots in the corporate world. There is no reason why women of Nigeria can’t rally the support of stakeholders to back women candidates for presidency in Nigeria especially by respected parties. HURIWA has therefore called on Women to rise up and set up strategic planning for credible women politicians to be readied to run for the elective office of President of Nigeria or at the worst, made the Vice President in the next general poll.’