Abstract
Despite increasingly sophisticated antidiscrimination laws, discrimination and inequality have proven remarkably resilient. This prompts questions about the limit of laws and chances to achieve social change. One way forward is to fashion legal tools, which impose duties to promote or achieve equality, rather than focusing on individual’s right against specific perpetrators . Gender and politics have in recent times become a contemporary issue in the minds of publicists. The two concepts pervade legal, socio-cultural as well as political discourse thereby not only brooding hatred amongst ‘being’ (i.e., the male and female), but has become a deity of social activism which has rendered some prisoners of gender-base- thoughts and thrive for political equilibrium. This paper appraised Nigeria’s Implementation of the National Policy of 35% Affirmative Action for Women with kin particularity to politics. The extent to which the 35% Affirmative Action for Women has been realized in Nigeria taking due cognizance of how poverty and literacy rates affect women political participation in the country. In the light of the feminist theory and with the aid of content analysis techniques, it is observed that the 35% Affirmative Action for women has not be realized in Nigeria because of high poverty rate and low literacy rate among women as well as non-application of compulsory party-based implementation strategies. In comparison, this paper also examines the situation and level of compliance to the policy of affirmative action in Norway. Why have Norwegian women enjoyed greater legislative representation than Nigeria and other countries? This paper also examines the system employed by the Norwegian government to achieve success and suggests useful recommendation to liberate the Nigerian situation in the struggle for gender equality and to strike a gender balance in the Nigerian political milieu.
Keywords: Affirmative action, Policy, Implementation, Comparison