Tinubu Is Finally Sending Bills for Special Seats for Women and PWDs, and We Found Out at Someone Else's Award Dinner

So here's some genuinely good news, delivered in the most Nigerian way possible: President Tinubu is preparing to send the National Assembly two executive bills, one creating special reserved seats for women (37 in the Senate, 37 in the House, one per state plus the FCT, with extra seats added at the state level too), and another reserving seats for Persons with Disabilities across federal, state, and local government legislatures.

Genuinely worth celebrating, if it actually lands. And here's the part that makes it very us: we didn't find this out at a National Assembly session, or a press briefing about the bill itself. Speaker Abbas announced it at a reception thrown by the Nigerian Institute of Public Relations, honouring a visiting American PR professor. So a major constitutional milestone for women and disabled Nigerians got its first public mention as a nice aside at somebody else's appreciation dinner.

The women's bill is still "being fine-tuned" at the Ministry of Justice. The PWD bill is coming "within a few weeks." And the Speaker's actual quote on timing was the single most Nigerian sentence available to any public official: "it is coming any time now." That phrase has no unit of measurement. It could mean Tuesday. It could mean 2029.

Worth remembering too: this isn't the first attempt. A very similar set of gender bills was already rejected by the National Assembly back in 2022. So if this one actually passes, it's less a new idea and more a long-overdue sequel that took four years to get greenlit.

To be clear, none of this is a joke at the expense of the people this is actually meant to help, women and disabled Nigerians deserve this seat at the table, properly, permanently, not eventually. The joke is entirely on a system that can announce something this significant at a random dinner and still call the timeline a plan.