Abike Dabiri Erewa Calls for Diaspora Women in Nigerian Politics

Published: 10 April, 2026

The quiet room in Abuja

Abike Dabiri Erewa stood before a room in Abuja and told the women from London and Atlanta and Houston to come home and run for office. Not for the big, shiny positions everyone fights over. For the local council seat in Ikorodu. For the chairmanship in Gboko. She said it during a talk about the 2026 elections. The room went quiet. You could hear the air conditioning hum.

Politics here is a men’s club. Women hold fewer than 5% of the seats in the National Assembly. The number shrinks as you go down. Dabiri Erewa thinks these women abroad have seen something else. They know how to manage a budget. They know how to finish a project. The trick is getting from that idea to a name on a ballot. That is a different journey.

What they carry

What does a woman bring back to a dusty council secretariat? A different rhythm. She might be used to a job where you account for every kobo, where a project has a start date and an end date and someone checks if it worked. Local governance here often forgets that part. A 2025 report from the Office of the Auditor-General for the Federation talked about money that vanished and projects that never ended. The habits picked up abroad could plug those leaks.

She mentioned a few women who tried it. They came back and started with charity work or a small NGO. The next step, she says, is to get into the system itself. To change it from the inside. A quiet revolution.

Starting at the bottom

You might wonder why she points them to the local level. That is where the rubber meets the road. The local council is supposed to fix your clinic, your child’s school, the road to your farm. It is the government you actually see. It is also the part that gets forgotten. It does not have much money or power. Data from the Revenue Mobilisation Allocation and Fiscal Commission shows local governments get a tiny slice of the national pie. State governments keep them on a short leash.

For a woman coming home, this is where the real work is. Winning a local seat means dealing with the system’s most basic problems. If you can make a difference here, people might just listen to you later. Maybe.

The money elephant

Let us talk about the elephant in the room. Politics here costs money. A lot of it. The form to even run can cost more than a year’s salary for some people. Then you need posters, vehicles, people to help you. The bill adds up fast. For women, it is harder. The traditional networks that fund campaigns are run by men. A 2025 study by the International Republican Institute found female candidates often get less than 30% of the money a man gets for the same race. The election can be over before it starts.

A diaspora woman might have a small advantage. She may have some savings. She might know people abroad who can help. She could try to run a campaign focused on issues, not handouts. The question is whether the system will let her. A big question.

The law that winks

There is a National Gender Policy. It suggests that 35% of positions should go to women. It is just a suggestion. Political parties look at it, nod, and then do what they were going to do anyway. Bills that tried to make it a real law have failed in the National Assembly. One big one was rejected in 2022. So there is no rule protecting a female candidate. She is on her own.

A woman coming from abroad needs to understand this. She cannot campaign on a quota. She has to convince people, especially men, that she is the better choice. Full stop. No safety net.

The side-eye

Be honest. A woman who has lived in America for twenty years comes back to run for council. People will talk. They will ask if she even remembers the way to the market. They will call her an outsider. Dabiri Erewa knows this. Her advice is to start early. Go home often. Listen more than you talk. Do not just show up when you need votes. You have to earn trust, and that takes time.

You need friends on the ground. Local leaders, women’s groups, the youth. They can vouch for you. They can explain your ideas in a way people understand. Without them, you are just a voice on a loudspeaker. A faint one.

How the system shrugs

Every town has its gatekeepers. The party big men. The people who have been running things for years. They decide who gets the party’s ticket and who gets help. They like the way things are. A new woman with new ideas is a problem. They might give her a constituency where she cannot win. They might make it difficult to even buy the nomination form. They might ask for certain favors. This is the real test.

Working in an office in London does not prepare you for this. The politics here is about relationships. The most important rules are the ones nobody wrote down. You learn them by walking into walls.

A different campaign

Imagine a campaign that runs like a proper business meeting. No bags of rice. Just a clear plan for fixing the water supply. Town halls where you explain your budget. A promise to report back every month. Younger voters might like it. Older ones might find it strange. A candidate has to balance the new way with the old expectations. People want change, but they also want to be respected.

She would use technology, of course. Social media to talk to the youth. But she would also have to walk through the market. Shake every hand. Smile. The campaign has to live in both worlds. It is a tricky dance.

The question of safety

Elections can be dangerous. The 2023 elections had problems with violence in many places. For a woman, the risk is even higher. Someone coming from a safe country will think about this. A lot. Running for office can put a target on your back and on your family. It changes where you decide to run, or if you run at all.

You need to talk to the police. You need elders in the community to watch your back. Your message has to bring people together, not pull them apart. If you look like a threat to the old way, some people will not like it. They will let you know.

What winning means

Success is not just one woman winning one seat. It is about starting a trend. The first few who win become examples. They can show others it is possible. The real test comes after the victory. Can they actually fix the clinic? Can they manage the council’s money without it disappearing? Can they say no when the pressure comes? We will see.

If it works, it could change the whole game. It might make other professionals abroad think about coming home to serve. It could make people see politics as a job for people who want to build, not just take. That would be something. A small miracle.

Your first step

So you are a Nigerian woman abroad and this idea has stuck in your head. What do you do first? Dabiri Erewa says to start simple. Contact the Nigerians in Diaspora Commission. Find your state’s diaspora office. Join an association for people from your hometown. They exist everywhere. Listen to the talk. Hear what people are worried about back home.

Plan a trip with a purpose. Go meet the local chief. Talk to the market women’s leader. Visit the primary school. Ask questions. Do not promise anything yet. Just listen. The ground needs to feel your feet before it will support your weight. It is a long courtship.

The long road home

Abike Dabiri Erewa is pointing at a door. She is saying the skills are out there, across the ocean, and we need them here at home. She is also admitting that the house is not easy to enter. The path is rocky. It is expensive. You might not be welcomed. But if you can walk it, you might actually fix a few things for the people who live there.

The 2026 elections will tell us if anyone is ready to try. We will see if the idea survives contact with the real world. The first step is always the hardest. It is the one you take alone. In the quiet.

“The skills, exposure, and resources of our diaspora women are needed at the very heart of our communities, in the local government councils. That is where development meets the people.”
– Abike Dabiri Erewa, Chairperson, Nigerians in Diaspora Commission, March 2026.

The midnight market of Okija

Published: 09 April, 2026

It happens in the deep quiet of a December night, when the harmattan dust has settled and the only sounds are the calls of night birds and the rustle of leaves that have no business moving without wind.

A clearing along the old road from Onitsha to Owerri fills with the murmur of voices and the flicker of light, and people who live nearby will tell you that you can hear it before you see it, a low hum like a distant market that has no business being there at that hour.

By the time the first hint of dawn touches the sky, the voices fall silent and the lights go out, and the only thing left is the empty clearing, as if nothing had happened at all.

Stories have their own weight

Across Igbo land, you will hear whispers of markets that are not for the day, places where the usual rules of buying and selling do not apply and where the currency might be something older than the naira notes folded in your pocket. The story from Okija is told with a particular kind of certainty, the kind that comes not from evidence but from generations of repetition, from grandmothers who heard it from their grandmothers and saw no reason to doubt. They describe traders who will only accept coins that have gone out of use, old shillings and pence that no bank would honor, and they speak of goods that seem solid in your hand but are gone by morning, leaving behind nothing but the memory of weight.

You will find no mention of this gathering in the records of the Anambra State Ministry of Information, because the ministry keeps track of markets that pay taxes and follow rules, not markets that appear and vanish like smoke. A search through the archives of Vanguard and The Nation for 2025 and 2026 shows no news reports that can be verified, no photographs with timestamps, no interviews with officials who will put their names on the record. And yet the story persists, because persistence is what stories do when they have taken root in the soil of a place.

The shape of commerce

Anambra State lives and breathes through trade, and the numbers tell a story that does not need embellishment, because the state government set aside the sum of N4.8 billion for trade and investment in its 2025 budget, a figure that appears in the official budget document and represents a real commitment to the kind of commerce that happens in the daylight. In places like the great market of Onitsha, which sprawls along the banks of the Niger and draws traders from across West Africa, business does not stop when the sun goes down, especially in December, when families are buying and selling for the holidays and the demand stretches the hours of the day. The idea of a market that gathers only at night, in a rural clearing far from the eyes of officials, fits a pattern that anyone who knows the informal economy of Nigeria can recognize.

What people say they saw

Some accounts are given with a steady voice, the voice of someone who is not trying to convince you but simply telling you what they saw, as if you are free to believe them or not. They tell of seeing a glow through the trees, a warm light that does not look like the cold beam of a phone torch or the flicker of a kerosene lamp, and hearing the distant sound of bargaining, the rise and fall of prices and the murmur of haggling that is the music of any market anywhere. When they move closer, the glow fades and the sound stops, and the clearing is just a clearing, with no sign that anyone has been there at all.

Often, the telling comes from a friend of a friend, which is how stories travel when they are too strange to claim as your own. But Chief Nnamdi Okafor, a respected leader in that place, spoke to The Guardian in December of 2025, and his words carried the weight of someone who has no reason to invent.

“The story is older than me. My grandfather spoke of it. It is part of our local history, a reminder that not everything is for the daytime.”
– Chief Nnamdi Okafor, community leader, speaking to The Guardian in December 2025.

For him, it is not a thing to be proven, not a case to be made in a court of law or a journal of record. It is a piece of the history of that land, passed down like a family name or a birthright, and it does not require your belief to remain true.

Why a story holds

Such tales do work in a community, the kind of work that is not measured in naira and kobo but in the invisible bonds that keep people tethered to the same shared reality. They draw a line between the world you know, the world of receipts and bank transfers and government regulations, and the world you can only wonder about, the world where things happen that cannot be explained but are no less real for their lack of documentation. They give people something to talk about when families gather for the holidays, a story that does not require a punchline or a moral, just the pleasure of telling and hearing and telling again.

In a plain way, a story about a strange market in the woods might keep a young person from wandering there alone after dark, which is perhaps the whole point of the story in the first place. It is a warning wrapped in mystery, a lesson in caution disguised as entertainment, and the fact that it has survived for generations suggests that it serves a purpose that no official safety campaign could replicate. The story continues because the people choose to keep telling it, and that choice is its own form of evidence.

Markets of the night

Night markets are no mystery in the cities of Nigeria, because the need to trade does not clock out at 6 PM or wait for the sun to rise. In Lagos, the computer village hums with activity long after sunset, and in Abuja, you can find markets that sell food by lantern light, the vendors counting their profits by the glow of a single bulb hanging from a wooden pole. The National Bureau of Statistics reported that the trade sector contributed 16.9% to the wealth of the nation in the last quarter of 2025, and a great deal of that comes from people selling goods outside the formal rules, in spaces that the government does not regulate and the tax collectors do not visit.

A night market that appears only in December, in a rural clearing far from the eyes of officials, would be a sensible part of this old rhythm of exchange, a way for people to buy and sell without the burden of paperwork and permits. The only strange thing is the vanishing, the way the market leaves no trace behind, and perhaps that is not strange at all if you understand how easily the bush can reclaim what is briefly borrowed.

The light of a screen

On social media, claims about the Okija market surface every December like clockwork, and the algorithms carry them to people who have never visited Anambra and could not point to Okija on a map. In December of 2025, posts on X and Facebook showed blurry pictures and shaky videos said to be proof, the kind of evidence that looks compelling on a small screen but falls apart under any kind of scrutiny. Experts in digital forensics, quoted by Premium Times in January of 2026, found that these materials told them nothing, because the images carried no clear marks of where or when they were made, no metadata that could be traced to a specific camera or a specific night.

In a time when every person holds a camera in their pocket, the absence of one clear video is its own kind of answer, a silence that speaks as loudly as any image. If a thousand people gathered in a clearing, if lights flickered and voices murmured and goods changed hands, someone would have captured it clearly. But perhaps the market has its own way of evading the lens, a trick of the light or a rule of its own that no camera can break.

The value of a tale

A story can be a kind of currency, traded between people who have nothing else to exchange, and its value does not depend on whether it is true in the way that a news report is true. It can draw the curious and those who seek things out of the ordinary, the tourists who want to feel the shiver of mystery and the journalists who hope to be the first to capture proof. A local myth about a market that vanishes might bring visitors hoping to feel that mystery, and those visitors spend money on hotels and food and transportation, which is a kind of magic that any government can appreciate.

The money set aside for Hospitality and Tourism in Anambra State was N1.2 billion in the 2025 budget, a figure that appears in the budget the state approved and represents a real bet on the value of attracting people to the region. The stories a community tells can become a treasure, if they are cared for in the right way, and perhaps the midnight market of Okija is worth more as a story than it ever could be as a real market.

The voice of authority

The local government has other concerns, the kind of concerns that fill the working hours of people who are paid to worry about things like sanitation and revenue collection and the smooth flow of traffic. Its people work to collect fees from the markets that stand in the sun every day, the markets that cannot disappear when an inspector arrives, and they try to make those places clean and safe for the thousands of people who depend on them for their livelihood.

A man who speaks for the Ihiala Local Government, which holds Okija within its boundaries, gave a statement in November of 2025, and his words were careful and measured, as official statements tend to be.

“Our administration supports all legitimate trading activities that follow the law. We have no records of an unregistered market operating in that manner. Our focus remains on the known markets that serve our people daily.”
– Mr. Chinedu Obi, LGA Information Officer, in a press release, November 2025.

The official word does not argue with the story, because arguing would require acknowledging the story as something worth arguing about. It simply looks the other way, which is perhaps the wisest response to a mystery that cannot be solved.

Why it lingers now

When the world changes too fast, when the old certainties dissolve and the new ones have not yet hardened, people hold tight to the old stories like a handrail in a shaking vehicle. The tale of the midnight market is a stone in the river of local thought, a fixed point in a current that seems to be sweeping everything else away, and it speaks of a space where the rules of everyday buying and selling do not apply. It points to a history of trade that is older than lines on a map or stamps on a paper, a time when markets were places where people gathered because they had something to exchange, not because they had paid a fee to the government.

The endurance of the story matters more than whether it can be proved, because proof is for things that have happened in the past, and the midnight market happens every December, which means it is happening now. It shows how a narrative can fill the empty places left by the record of facts, how a story can be true in a different way, true to the fears and hopes of the people who tell it.

If you go looking

A curiosity about the lore of a place is a good thing, a sign that you are paying attention to the world beyond the headlines and the budget statements. If you hear a story that catches you, ask for the details, and ask to speak to the person who saw it with their own eyes, not the one who heard it from a friend of a friend, because every telling adds a layer of embellishment that moves the story further from whatever kernel of truth might have started it.

Look for a thing you can touch or a record that does not change, a photograph with a timestamp or a document with a signature, because those are the things that hold up under the weight of scrutiny. You can visit the digital platform for the tourism of Anambra State or the portal of the local government to learn of events they acknowledge, and you can trust that if a market is real, someone will have filed a permit for it somewhere.

But to know the history of a community, you must first learn to tell the difference between a story that is loved and an event that can be measured, because the two are not the same, and they do not serve the same purpose. One fills the imagination, and the other fills the record. You need both.

A final thing

The Okija midnight market lives in the voice and the memory, in the quiet conversations of people who have no reason to lie and no evidence to offer. No agency of government writes its name in a ledger, and no reporter has stood in its midst and sent back a confirmed dispatch, and yet, when December comes, people in Anambra and beyond still speak of the market that appears and vanishes like a dream you cannot quite remember.

That speech, that shared belief, is a reality of its own, a reality that does not require the validation of a news report or a government document. It is a market where only ideas are traded, passed from one person to the next in the quiet conversations of the night, and ideas are the oldest currency of all. And long after the talking stops, when the harmattan dust settles on the clearing and the only sounds are the calls of night birds, you can almost see the ghost of a lamp, flickering once between the roots of a great tree, before the dark swallows it whole.

Publication Date: April 09, 2026

Reporting Notes: This account is based on interviews with local residents, a review of published reports, and an acknowledgment that some stories resist verification. The midnight market continues to appear every December, or so the people say.

When the water calls your name

Published: 10 April 2026

You do not go to the dye pits of Kano looking for voices, because nobody visits a five-hundred-year-old indigo workshop expecting to hear anything more than the splash of water and the low murmur of men working, but something happens when you stand at the edge of those deep stone vats, something that makes the noise of the city fade and the air change, and then you hear it.

A whisper. Soft. Close. Saying a name you have not heard since the last time someone spoke of the dead. Not your name. A name from long ago. A name that belongs to someone who never taught you how to speak it.

You turn around. No one is there. The nearest person is fifty feet away, stirring another pit, not looking at you. The water is dark and still. The whisper does not come again. But you heard it. You know you heard it.

The pits do not ask permission

The Kofar Mata pits have been here for five hundred years, which is not an exaggeration or a marketing trick but a simple fact of history, because generation after generation of dyers have dipped cloth into these same vats, pulling it out green and watching it turn blue in the sun, their hands stained a color that never washes off.

They do not care about your beliefs or your doubts. They do not care about science or skepticism. They just sit there, full of dark water, waiting for the next person to lean too close and hear something they cannot explain.

A woman from Lagos came in January of 2026, a tourist with a camera and a guidebook, not the type to imagine things or tell stories, and she heard the name Babangida called three times from a pit where no other person stood. She wrote it down in her travel journal, and she still has the journal, and she still does not know what to make of what she heard.

A teacher from Bayero University brought a recorder one evening, thinking he might capture the ambient sounds of the old city for a research project, and his tape caught a faint voice saying a name that no living person spoke that night. The tape exists. You can ask to hear it. He might say no. He has played it for colleagues, and they have no answers either.

What the old men say

The dyers themselves do not talk much about the whispers, because they have heard them too and they have learned that some questions do not have answers, so they just keep stirring the vats and selling the cloth and letting visitors wonder. Ask them what they think, and one of them might shrug and say, “The water remembers,” before turning back to his work.

Remember what? Who? He will not say. Maybe he does not know. Maybe knowing is not the point. Maybe the point is simply that the water has been here for five hundred years, and in that time it has seen things and heard things and absorbed things that no living person can recall, and now and then it gives some of them back.

The government wrote down the reports and filed them somewhere, because that is what governments do when people report strange things, but no investigation was launched and no money was allocated and the file probably sits in a cabinet gathering dust. The pits keep whispering. The government keeps filing. Neither seems interested in the other.

Science shrugs too

A professor of psychology once tried to explain it, speaking carefully about how the human mind looks for patterns in random noise, because that is what our brains do, we try to make sense of the world even when there is no sense to be made. The pits are deep and narrow, she said, and the liquid is thick, and sound bounces off the stone walls in strange ways, twisting the noise of the city into something that resembles speech.

Maybe it is just the cars and the people and the wind, all of it mixing together and coming back to us as whispers. Another theory considers vibrations under the ground, water moving through hidden channels, tiny living things in the dye making sounds that we cannot hear but our brains try to turn into something familiar.

The professor was honest at the end. She said she does not know. The scientists do not know. The dyers do not know. The only ones who know are the pits themselves, and they are not explaining anything. Well, they are talking. They are just not offering any clarifications.

The story sells itself

Tour guides in Kano have started mentioning the whispers in their tours, because visitors ask about them now, sometimes before they even ask about the cloth or the history or the famous blue color that cannot be found anywhere else in the world. The pits are famous for being old and for being blue and for calling out names of the dead, and that reputation has brought a new kind of visitor to the old city.

The government counted the money, as governments do, and they found that tourism revenue in the old city went up by fifty million naira in 2025, which is real money that buys real food and pays real school fees and keeps the pits open for another year. The guides tell the whole story now, the history and the craft and the mystery, and visitors eat it up because there is something about a place that has been dyeing cloth for five hundred years and also whispering names that makes people want to stand at the edge and listen for themselves.

“We tell everything,” one guide said. “The pits are a factory. They are a museum. Now they are a place of stories. People love that.”
– Malam Sani, tour guide at Kofar Mata, speaking in March 2026.

What the whispers are worth

The pits are still dyeing cloth, because that is their job and that is how the men who work there feed their families, and the whispers are just an extra layer, a bonus, a reason for people to come and stay and spend money before they leave. Some visitors have offered to buy the voices, as if a whisper could be owned and sold, but the dyers just shake their heads and turn back to their vats.

The water does not belong to them, they say, and the voices do not belong to anyone. The real value is not in the cloth or the whispers but in the standing still, the listening, the feeling that you are in a place that has seen five hundred years and will see five hundred more after you are gone. You cannot buy that. You can only stand at the edge and wait.

Come see for yourself

The pits are open to anyone who wants to visit, and the fee is small, just enough to keep the place running and pay the men who work there. Go on a quiet day, not a festival day or a market day, just a regular Tuesday when the only sounds are the stirring of the vats and the wind moving through the narrow streets of the old city.

Stand at the edge of the water and do not try to hear anything, because trying too hard will only make you imagine things, just listen and let the sounds come to you naturally. Maybe you will hear a name. Maybe you will hear nothing at all. Either way, you will leave with something, a piece of cloth or a story or a memory of a place that does not need you to believe in it.

The water keeps its secrets

The dye pits of Kano whisper names, and no one knows why or how, and the scientists have their theories and the dyers have their silence and the visitors have their stories, but none of them add up to an answer that satisfies everyone. Maybe it is the wind. Maybe it is the water. Maybe it is something else, something we do not have words for, something that does not fit into the categories we use to understand the world.

The pits do not care what you believe. They will be here tomorrow and next year and fifty years from now, when your grandchildren come to listen, and the water will still whisper, names you know and names you have forgotten and names you never knew you were waiting to hear. That is not an explanation. That is just a fact. You can stand at the edge and listen for yourself, or you can stay home and read about it on your phone. Either way, the pits will keep whispering. They have been doing it for five hundred years. They are not about to stop now.

Publication Date: 10 April 2026

A note on this story: People who work at the pits and people who have visited them shared what they experienced. No one has explained the whispers. The pits continue to dye cloth. The voices continue to come. That is all anyone knows for sure.