Delivering the keynote address at the Chartered Institute of Directors Nigeria’s Women Directors Biennial Conference 2026 in Lagos, former Lagos State Governor Babatunde Raji Fashola opened with a blunt challenge to conventional wisdom: the idea that women’s presence in leadership hasn’t translated into real influence, he said, simply does not match what he witnessed running a state government.
Fashola, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria and former Minister of Power, Works and Housing, backed the claim with numbers from his own tenure. By the time he left office, women held 40 of the state’s 57 high court judgeships and 73 of its 101 magistrate positions, along with seven of the ten most senior administrative posts in the judiciary. Lagos had also had a female head of service and three chief judges in succession, each reaching the role through ordinary seniority rather than any deliberate push. One handover stood out to him in particular: a departing chief judge passing the office to her own sister, both daughters of the late Justice James. Women, he said, outnumbered men at the permanent secretary level too, the highest rung of the civil service career ladder, and nothing in his experience suggested they ran their courtrooms or ministries with any less authority than their male peers. He added dryly that men had not yet gotten around to claiming they were an endangered group.
The conference theme, “From Presence to Power: Advancing Women’s Influence in the Boardroom,” set up remarks from other speakers that sharpened the distinction Fashola was drawing. CIoD Nigeria President Adetunji Oyebanji told attendees that boardroom presence has become the baseline rather than the goal in the corporate world, no longer a niche concern but a mainstream priority. He drew a hard line between being present and holding actual power: presence lets you speak, he said, but power lets your perspective redirect a company’s trajectory, chair its audit committee or help pick its next chief executive, rather than simply appearing as a line in a diversity report. He recalled that the fight, only a few decades ago, was for a single seat at the table.
CIoD Nigeria Women’s Group Chairman Ronke Sokefun, delivering the welcome address, framed the gathering as a meeting point for governance, enterprise and leadership where ideas would be tested and challenged. She argued that boardrooms are not ceremonial spaces but places where real risk gets weighed and real decisions get made, and that leadership diversity has become a strategic imperative rather than a social aspiration, since it strengthens governance, sharpens risk oversight and builds lasting stakeholder confidence. Women, she said, are no longer asking simply to be included.
