[On gender ideology] If there's one place where a woman should be able to speak up about these issues, that should be parliament.

Breaking down biases against women parliamentarians requires concentrated efforts, adopting a moral situation strategy to engage female parliamentarians and community leaders on what community stand to gain when more women go to the parliament. Women focus in the parliament should regularly should regularly engage with political party leaders, civil society organization, as well as socio-cultural organizations for an enlighten conversations. We must go beyond the strategic approaches and begin to appeal to the sensibilities of the men as every items to push for more women representations in Nigeria through legislation have failed.

"Parliament" is a word of magic and power in this country. We refer to "parliamentary sovereignty." We live under the sovereignty of the Crown in Parliament. Our history and political life would be unintelligible if Parliament were removed from that history. There is no other European nation of which the same can be said. There is no other European nation at the heart of whose identity and history lies its parliamentary assembly.

We are committed to ensuring that women's representation is achieved. Yes, there are challenges— for instance, in the executive, the representation stands at 26%, when it should be 35%. However, the situation in parliament is much better than in the executive.

Women have brought a different culture to Parliament. It’s less of a beer-swilling, let’s sort things out in the bar kind of place.

We definitely need more women in decision-making and particularly in parliaments. For example in the DRC, they have a constitution that acknowledges parity, but they need the law to effect that. And in addition to the law, they also need to make investments in women, their education, their ability to actually participate in diplomacy and therefore, in the decision-making that goes along. In addition, there are a number of investments that need to be made in line with the laws aimed at empowering women.

Parliament is not a congress of ambassadors from different and hostile interests; which interests each must maintain, as an agent and advocate, against other agents and advocates; but parliament is a deliberative assembly of one nation, with one interest, that of the whole; where, not local purposes, not local prejudices ought to guide, but the general good, resulting from the general reason of the whole. You choose a member indeed; but when you have chosen him, he is not a member of Bristol, but he is a member of parliament.

We need very intensive civic education with the society, because we are socialized to accept discrimination against women even when you notice it. We have a good legislative framework for women, when I first got into Parliament, we were about 16 women in Parliament…now we are over 100.

Parliament (by which I mean, of course, the elected House of Commons stripped of all irresponsible encumbrances) is the institution which has played the central, liberating role in our history ever since Cromwellian or even Elizabethan times; no comparable institution certainly has shaped so continuously the life and society of any Western European state. It is the authority of our distinctive Parliament which is one of the stakes in the choice now before the people.

In my country at present, women have no participation in the higher levels of government and none whatsoever in the judiciary. Even within the democratic movement only 14 out of the 485 MPs elected in 1990 were women -- all from my own party, the National League for Democracy. These 14 women represent less than 3 percent of the total number of successful candidates. They, like their male colleagues, have not been permitted to take office since the outcome of those elections has been totally ignored. Yet the very high performance of women in our educational system and in the management of commercial enterprises proves their enormous potential to contribute to the betterment of society in general. Meanwhile our women have yet to achieve those fundamental rights of free expression, association and security of life denied also to their menfolk.

Parliament is very unfriendly for a woman with a child. We are talking about it and we would like to see more women with children getting into parliament and then performing their parental duties without hindrance, without neglecting the children."

... the role of the parliamentarian is to see that your constituency get what the government provides for them ... children should be educated, women be empowered, pregnant women have free access to healthcare and develop the chiefdoms as well

Parliamentary government is simply a mild and disguised form of compulsion. We agree to try strength by counting heads instead of breaking heads, but the principle is exactly the same... The minority gives way not because it is convinced that it is wrong, but because it is convinced that it is a minority.

The role of women is strong and we have addressed this quite often. We have a number of women in decision-making positions in the legislature, in the communities and in regions, and we have now acquired 30% representation by women