Nigeria’s 2027 presidential election will feature 18 candidates on the ballot when voters go to the polls on January 16, 2027, and only two of them are women. The Independent National Electoral Commission’s final list, published in September 2026, confirms Dr. Esther Nkem Okereke and Ada Elizabeth Frederick Okwori as the sole female presidential candidates, entering a field dominated by familiar names like incumbent President Bola Tinubu, former Vice President Atiku Abubakar and former Anambra State Governor Peter Obi.
Esther Nkem Okereke, 43, is running under the National Rescue Movement, having secured the party’s ticket at its national convention in Abuja in May 2026. Publicly known as an actress and filmmaker, Okereke has also built a background in entrepreneurship and humanitarian work, and she has described that experience outside politics as what informed her decision to run. At her emergence as the NRM’s candidate, she framed her candidacy as a call to national service. Her platform, branded the ESTHER Agenda, centres on education, security, technology, housing, entrepreneurship and restitution, while the NRM has positioned her campaign more broadly around a national rescue agenda addressing insecurity, economic hardship, education, electricity, healthcare, housing, job creation and government accountability. She is running with 35-year-old Sulaiman Nasir Muhammed as her vice-presidential candidate, making theirs one of the youngest tickets in the race, and she has made women’s and youth political participation a consistent part of her public message.
Ada Elizabeth Frederick Okwori, 48, arrived at this race through a different route entirely, by building the party she now leads. She is the presidential candidate of the National Democratic Party, a political platform that only secured registration after a legal battle with INEC. Okwori was among the party’s promoters who challenged INEC’s earlier refusal to register the NDP, and in February 2026, the Federal High Court in Abuja ordered INEC to register it, finding that the promoters had met the required constitutional and statutory conditions. INEC subsequently listed the NDP as a recognised party, with Okwori named as its national chairman by that court order. The NDP’s own materials describe its platform as built around accountable leadership, inclusion, national development and putting citizens at the centre of governance, and the party has identified women’s political participation as part of its agenda. Okwori is contesting alongside 48-year-old Chukwuemeka Uchenna Anthony as her running mate.
Their candidacies sit inside a wider pattern of underrepresentation. Across the 18 presidential tickets, only four women appear as vice-presidential candidates alongside Okereke and Okwori, Peace Egobia Ofordile of the Allied Peoples Party, Nafisat Usaku Abubakar of the Democratic Labour Alliance, Hajja Bintu Konto of the Labour Party and Patience Ndidi Key of the Young Progressive Party. The pattern holds further down the ballot too, of the 4,408 candidates contesting Senate and House of Representatives seats in 2027, only 443, roughly 10 percent, are women. Whatever happens in January, Okereke and Okwori’s campaigns will stand as a measure of how far Nigerian women still have to go to move from participating in politics to actually holding its highest offices.
