Nigeria, Africa’s largest democracy by population, is the lowest-ranked country in sub-Saharan Africa for women’s representation in parliament. Yet, in a perverse celebration of International Women’s Day, the 109-member Senate suspended one of only four female senators after she accused the Senate president of sexual harassment.

The response of the Senate and public reaction to Senator Natasha Akpoti Uduaghan’s accusation highlight multiple challenges for women’s political participation in Nigeria, but the situation also calls into question the global industry for funding and programming for “women’s political leadership” and commitments to Sustainable Development Goal 5. In 2021, UN Women launched Generation Equality, with six actions, including feminist movements and leadership, raising over $50 billion in commitments.

Despite being part of that multimillion-dollar industry, I have doubts about the tactics for increasing women’s political participation and representation. In Love Does Not Win Elections, where I document my experience contesting the primaries for a seat in the House of Representatives in 2014, I point out that the small number of women who win elections owe their wins more to the men they cohabit with or are related to than they do to women’s votes or civil-society-funded capacity-building workshops. Senator Uduaghan’s path to the Senate and her battle to stay in office expose more inconsistencies.

First, nothing in the CSO-funded playbook prepares women for the chicanery and abuses of power that frequently happen during election campaigns: closing airports, impromptu public holidays to thwart courts sitting—these are the kinds of obstacles candidates face in Nigerian elections. On the eve of the 2023 senatorial elections, the roads leading to Senator Uduaghan’s constituencies in Kogi State were dug up. Without money, she could not have responded in the way she did: by hiring a fleet of graders to level the roads. Nor could she have rented a helicopter, as she did a few weeks ago, to thwart the Kogi State governor’s attempt to prevent her from visiting her constituencies in Kogi Central during Eid.

This raises the second incongruence: Contesting elections is expensive, and women get no direct funding for their campaigns or for navigating the courts even as election petitions increased by 56 percent between 2019 and 2023, because, as someone put it, “citizens can vote, but winners are decided in the courtroom …”

Where do funds go? Short answer: salaries, consultancy fees, workshops, conferences, and advocacy visits. If accountability makes it difficult to imagine donor funds being disbursed to female politicians, then surely funding the defense of their elections through litigation or financial support when they come under attack is not unreasonable.

Third, the toxic pragmatism of some organizations working to increase women’s political representation makes it harder to build democratic values in a country still struggling with the concept. In 2021, UN Women commended then Governor of Kogi State Yahaya Bello for allocating 21 vice-chair and council speaker positions in the local government elections to women. While on the face of it this was affirmative action in practice, one has to question the legitimacy of elections where the governor’s party won 100 percent of the seats and why the women were not the chairpersons. When Senator Uduaghan campaigned against Bello in 2019 as the only female gubernatorial candidate, she was physically and verbally attacked, her campaign office was razed, and INEC removed her party logo from the result sheets in a bid to disqualify her on a technicality. It was during this violent election period that Salome Abuh, a female politician, was burned to death in her home in Kogi. Bello’s cynical champion-of-women veneer is just another example in the history of autocrats using women’s political access as proof of democratic values, as in the case of Rwanda’s Paul Kagame. While hundreds of CSOs have rallied around Senator Uduaghan in the past month, the well-funded agencies and philanthropies who tout women’s political participation have been mute even during the bogus process to recall her.

Finally, the fact that the few women who have been elected since Nigeria’s return to civil rule in 1999 largely fade into obscurity when they leave office and are not engaged in any social causes, not even as advocates for women’s political representation, is telling.

If the cut in USAID funding for gender equity and democratic practice was not enough reason to review programs for increasing women’s political participation, then Senator Uduaghan’s case is. There is already too little financial commitment to women’s political representation—UN Women’s allocation in 2022 was 1.8 percent of United Nations revenue—but we must question if what is available is being put to effective use in Nigeria.