JENDA: A JOURNAL OF CULTURE AND AFRICAN WOMEN STUDIES ISSN: 1530-5686 Issue 8 (2006)

Safiya Dantiye

The belief almost everywhere is that women outnumber men, and therefore they are more than men in the world. This belief is also taken for granted in Nigeria, but people got a shocker when the National Population Commission (NPC) has released the census result and revealed that men are indeed more in number than women in Nigeria by indicating that the population of males is 71,709,859,while females are 68,293,683. This will really affect women’s morale where the activists among them always emphasized that with their greater number, women could rally behind a woman candidate and defeat any man, because of the lesser number of men. Or the truth is that the men don’t care to vote that is why more women go to vote and it is assumed that they are more in number?

The NPC result has opened a controversy, because a lot of people say they don’t believe that men are more than women in this country, giving examples that in market places and other gatherings women are more than men. So where are the men? May be they don’t attend gatherings as much as women, in fact most men think such is the priority of women. And many men don’t like to go to the market; they prefer to give the housekeeping money to the wives than for them to go to the market.

But what came to my mind on reading the census result was the taunts women suffer from men; that because they are surplus they are in the pathetic position of looking for husbands. This implies that not every woman will get a husband even a space in a monogamous house and other insults. In fact there are so many women that they are kamar jamfa a Jos, as the Hausa proverb has it, to indicate abundance or surplus. My friend once said, "If women are so many, why are the men not rushing to marry them, because there are so many men of marriageable age that are not married."

The answer to this is probably the men can’t afford the bride price, such as the betrothed clothes, shoes and many other things that custom demands. So the reason is not really that women are so many since not every man is married, but rather one of financial problem.

Also since women are more anxious to get married because time is not on their side, especially biologically, where they want to get married in their most reproductive years, in order to have children, they may be seen as more. After all you can hardly find a man that laments he is 'too old' and not yet married.

A story reported from Gombe state in the Daily Trust of January 3,2007 supports this, because in spite of the headline; suitors’ scarcity: Gombe traditional ruler pegs bride price, according to the report, Mai Tangale, the traditional ruler of Tangale tribe of Billiri local government area, Dr. Buba Maisheru 11, said he took this action because of his worries over the inability of young girls to get prospective husbands within his domain as a result of high bride price. The bride price, said the report had been pegged to N25,000.

From the above report we can see that they pegged the bride price not because there are more women than men, but because the high bride price makes it difficult for the men to go and marry the girls. As I was writing this a female colleague saw it and said "women are more than men, how could NPC said that men are more?"

"Well, that’s what they found according to the census they conducted," I answered. "They might have counted more men than women, that’s all," she insisted. Nevertheless, pray, where did the millions of women hide that the population of men surpassed them with more than three million? From people’s displeasure, they apparently want the NPC to provide the answer. But to me I feel that if the NPC knew they would have gone to the hiding places and count them.

Thereafter, now that men are more than women in Nigeria, are the men going to continue taunting women and imply that they can change them as they like and discard them at will? Some men even go further and say that men are 'expensive.' Women and girls can now hold their heads high, after all they are now the 'expensive' ones and may be more scarce than men have ever been, that is if they had really been, not the pigment or warped imagination of some men. Also what is the position of women now, because if they have any advantage over men it’s their number that they always flag in the face of men either to be proud, intimidate or blackmail. If this is also taken from women, I am at a loss at what to grab next as our advantage over men.

Citation Format:

Safiya Dantiye. “Now That Men Are More Than Women . . . ” JENDA: A Journal of Culture and African Women Studies: Issue 8, 2006.

Copyright © 2006 Africa Resource Center, Inc.