Yes, I thank God, I am not a woman. What
a relief! I celebrate this because I cannot imagine how I would have
coped with the mistreatment, molestation's, and discrimination's from the
male folks who think they own the world. Globally, women’s rights are
not guaranteed and well-respected. In Nigeria, nay Africa, the fate of
women is worse off. It is said that poverty bears the face of a woman.
Legally, culturally, socially, educationally, economically and
politically, Nigerian women are discriminated against. This is
heart-wrenching!
Culturally, in many Nigerian societies,
women are not perceived as being equal to men. They are not allowed to
be community leaders neither are their views considered when decisions
are to be made about their families and communities. A section of the
Nigerian society believes that women are acquired as chattels and do not
have a say in how families are run. They are denied inheritance rights
and are mistreated including being divorced on account of not being able
to give birth to a male child even when science has proved beyond
reasonable doubt that a woman can only give birth to a male child when
the husband donates Y chromosome to fertilize the X of the woman.
Education of a girl child is not prioritized in many Nigerian societies. The boy child owes that premium.
Rather than being sent to school, they are married off at a tender age
to go and procreate. When they become baby mothers, they face the
challenge of being infected with Vesico Vagina Fistula. Many of the baby
mothers infected with the VVF stink because of the frequent discharges.
Unfortunately, those families who dare to enroll their girl children in
school are now being discouraged with the abduction of over 200 Chibok
girls in Borno State in April 2014 and the recent abduction of another
110 girls in Dapchi, Yobe State in February 2018. Even in the
cosmopolitan Lagos State, schoolgirls have been abducted.
It does not come to me as surprise
therefore that research has shown that women account for more than half
the number of people living with HIV worldwide and that young women
(10-24 years old) are twice as likely to acquire HIV as young men the
same age. This is because of the high prevalence of rape and sexual molestation's against girls and women. There are also far more many
women earning living as sex workers. In 2016, news broke about the
sex-for-food phenomenon in some Internally Displaced Persons’ camps in
the North-East Nigeria. In conflict situations, be it ethnology-religious or
political, women and children bear greater brunt of such crises. They
are raped, maimed, and murdered while the traumatized survivors race to
the IDP camps to live in deplorable conditions with no adequate food,
shelter, clothing and medicare. Are you still wondering why I am
thanking God that I am not a woman?
Economically, women are dis-empowered.
Many of them are not in decision-making organs of the Ministries,
Department and Agencies of government or are they to be found in the
upper echelons of blue chip private companies. Men dominate those
spaces. Those who want to obtain loans from the banks are asked for
collateral which many women don’t have. Women are found more in menial
jobs such as hawking, working as house helps, earning a living as site laborers and street sweepers. Some men who are financially buoyant
sometimes bar their wives from working. To them, they are willing and
ready to provide for all the family needs. What these men do not know or
chose to ignore is that there is something called “occupational
therapy”. Earning a living has its own therapeutic effect on a person.
In search of greener pastures, women are
trafficked abroad to be used as sex slaves or house helps. They are the
prime target of stalking ritualists who use their body parts for ritual
money-making. Girls are also now being wired up as suicide bombers by
insurgents. Socially, women are discriminated against. They are the butt
of jokes of comedians and secular musicians portray them as sex symbols
in their music. X-rated songs are composed for them while they are
encouraged to dance almost naked in musical videos.
In politics, Nigerian women are worse
off! Only a sprinkle of them are found in legislative assemblies at the
federal and state levels. In the Eight National Assembly, out of the 109
senators, there are only seven women. For the House of Representatives,
out of the 360 seats, women are occupying only 15. With almost a
century of electoral democracy experience, Nigeria has yet to produce a
single elected female governor while only four of them are currently
occupying the seat of deputy governors out of the 36 states. In a
federal cabinet of 36 ministers, only five are women. No female
President or vice president elected yet in the country.
There are at present 68 political
parties with few of them having female chairpersons. In many of these
parties, the reserved position for women is that of Women Leader. Women
do not fare well in Nigerian politics due to a number of artificial
barriers and hurdles placed on their way. For instance, Nigerian
politics is highly monetized, fraught with violence and discriminatory
against the female gender. Nocturnal meetings are the norm and many
married women who delve into Nigeria’s murky waters of politics are
labeled as promiscuous and ineluctable. Legally speaking, the law even
discriminates against women. Did you know that Section 55(1)(d) of the
Penal Code of Northern Nigeria provides that an assault by a man on a
woman is not an offense if they are married, if native law or custom recognizes such a “correction” as lawful, and if there is no grievous
hurt. What kind of archaic law is that?
In order to change the tide in favor of
women, many initiatives have been made. Apart from the fact that
Nigeria is a signatory to many international human rights charters and
instruments, we have participated in many international conferences
aimed at addressing discrimination against women. Though Nigeria has
signed on to the Convention on Elimination of all forms of
Discrimination against Women, the country has yet to domesticate it.
While it is good that Nigeria now has Violence against Persons
(Prohibition) Act 2015, it has yet to have the Gender and Equal
Opportunities Act. The bill was thrown out by the Senate. While it is
true that by 1979 all Nigerian women therefrom acquired voting rights
once they are 18 years old and registered to vote; and that we now have
federal and state ministries of Women Affairs, a lot still needs to be
done to ensure gender parity in Nigeria.
Just last Thursday, March 8, 2018,
Nigerian women joined their counterparts the world over to celebrate the
International Women’s Day while last Sunday was also celebrated by a
section of the country’s Christian community as Mother’s Day. After the
celebrations, what next? This is therefore a call to action to enhance
the status of women in Nigeria and indeed globally. I like the theme of
this year’s IWD which was #PressforProgress. Given the fact that the
World Economic Forum’s 2017 Global Gender Gap Report findings revealed
that gender parity is over 200 years away, it is indeed time to press
for progress.
Nigeria needs affirmative action to
redress centuries of discrimination's against women especially in
politics and public life. This can be done constitutionally through
quota system as is the case in Kenya, Uganda and some other countries or
by entrenching it in the constitution of our political parties or both.
I may be glad not to be a woman but I have a mother, a wife and a
daughter. For their sake and because of millions of Nigerian women
suffering from discrimination, I am pressing for progress; for the
removal of all forms of barriers against women. A bird cannot fly with
one wing neither is it possible to clap with one hand. Gender parity
will enhance national development as both sexes get to play equal role.
