Women threaten to boycott election

WOMEN in Chimbu have threatened to boycott the general election if the Bill on the promised 22 reserved seats for women is not passed by parliament.
Women’s leaders in the province said the Somare and O’Neill governments promised to deliver the reserved seats and they wanted them to fulfil their commitments.
Chimbu Women In-Politics president Dere Cecilia and Julie Anna Kuri, the former president of the Chimbu Council of Women and appointed member on the provincial assembly, said if the Bill was not passed, women in the province would not vote in the general election.
Kuri said women in the province and in the country had high expectation that the two leaders would deliver.
She said it was an important Bill because since independence women’s voices had not been heard in parliament.
Kuri, who contested the Chimbu regional seat in the 2007 general election, said time was not on their side.
She appealed to MPs to put aside their diffe­rences and pass the bill for the women.
their mothers, wives, sisters and daughters.
She said if the Bill was passed, women’s representatives would be selected based on merit.
She said if parliament did not want to pass the Bill, it should reserve all regional seats for women.
Cecilia said if they were to trust the MPs they had to prove to the women they could deliver what they had promised.
She claimed women’s leaders had agreed to boycott the election and they would do it.