Gender Imbalance in President Buhari’s Ministerial Nominations and Reactions by the Nigerian Press: Advocacy or Complacency?
Godwin B. Okon, Hyacinth Orlu-Orlu

Abstract
President Muhammadu Buhari’s list of ministerial nominees, which was sent to the Senate for confirmation, on September 30, 2015, had twenty –one (21) names. Of this, eighteen (18) were male while three (3) were female. It is against the backdrop Of MDG 3(Gender Equality and Women Empowerment) and SDG (5) that this study sought to find out how the Nigerian press reacted to this gender imbalance with a view to streamlining their disposition within the frame of advocacy and complacency. Content analysis was employed to study the manifest content of three national newspapers – The Guardian, This Day, and The Punch, and two national magazines – Tell and News watch- which were purposively selected based on outlook and spread. The actual issues of the newspapers studied were also selected based on a consecutive day period with October, 2015 as the period of study. Measurement was done using column centimeters. The inter-coder reliability which employed Holsti formula stood at 0.91. Findings showed a lack of will by the Nigerian press to constructively criticize, through content, the President’s disproportionate gender distribution in political appointments. Findings further revealed that the Nigerian press did not proactively engage in advocacy geared towards enthroning best practices in the light of the MDGs and SDGs especially as they relate to governance and women empowerment. The inference from the foregoing therefore contextualized the disposition of the Nigerian press as complacent. To this end, it was recommended that the Nigerian press should deploy editorial content embellished in advocacy to chart the pathway for egalitarianism through government policies that serve to optimally integrate the potentials of women in the socio-political repertoire of Nigeria.

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