The United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women representative to Nigeria and ECOWAS, Beatrice Eyong, says poverty is a major cause of vote-buying in Nigeria.

Mr Eyong said this when she received the national officials of the women wing of the Christian Association of Nigeria (WOWICAN) in Abuja.

The UN official said that the UN Women planned to initiate programmes to tackle the problem of vote-buying.

The CAN women representatives were at the UN House in Abuja to seek collaboration to end gender-based issues in Nigeria.

“We have talked about buying and selling of votes, and that is a challenge. I tell you, poverty is one of the things that is promoting buying and selling of votes, and we are thinking that if we do programmes, we may improve women’s income status and other people in the villages,” said the UN representative.

According to Ms Eyong, the two major programmes are the Rural Women Economic Empowerment Programme and Market Women Transformational Initiative.

“I’m happy that you people also work with rural women,” Ms Eyong told the CAN women. “The second one is the market women transformational initiative. I saw that people are working on market women. They are working on petty traders. These are some of the things we are interested in.”

She assured the women of partnership and commended the interreligious involvement, which she described as wise and a way of acquiring more knowledge.

“You are a credible partner. We will like to continue our work with you to advance more good things. I am very happy that we have this collaboration with the Muslim women. We have to also involve them because they too will have other people,” she said.

Victoria Ihesiulor, WOWICAN national president, said they planned to run programmes to ensure women and youth shun all electoral ills.

“We have planned sensitisation and mobilisation. We need to sensitise our women, call them together and let them know. We then organise training that vote-buying and payments make one suffer for many years,” stated Ms Ihesiulor. 

The WOWICAN president added, “By the time they come and give you N5,000, N10,000 or even N20,000, after spending that money, the person enters for four years and takes another four years, that’s eight years. You will suffer for eight years If you don’t vote for the right people.”

According to Ms Ihesiulor, WOWICAN has 48 million registered members across the country. 

(NAN)