The insecurity we face today didn’t just generate. No. It formed over time for long. We ignored key problems and pretended it was all fine. Now, this is only reckoning day. It has been a myriad of factors. But fundamental of all is the neglect, abuse and the exploitation of women and their children. So in seeking solutions, you look for the roots, not the branches.
Yes, street kids, delinquent characters and many. But then it is their mothers that we cheated for long who still hold it against us that we must ask for forgiveness. Women liberation and empowerment is the immediate area that we all must look into with genuine commitment and renewed vigour.
Women Empowerment (WE) refers to the web of ideas or activities that relate to solving problems of women in the world. It is also a process with pragmatic stages which depend on the nature, dimension and depth of a given problems affecting women in a given society.
But generally, it is common that WE is a long process that begins with women liberation from shackles of cultural, traditional and social problems first, and then culminates into Women Political Empowerment (WPE) or the campaign for women in political leadership.
Between the stages in the process, there are a number of other sectoral empowerments for women, depending on the immediate priorities of the women in the focus of the empowerment campaign’s definition. And this depends also on the kind of society a given women targets for what empowerments are.
In my part of the world, there appears to be a careless misconception of the idea and that seems to support the other campaign that has a problem with, or is even fighting the WE cause. It is purposive because the antagonists may be so conscious of this fact and may have been used it all along to reinforce it against the bulk of WE by using the religious or traditional ideas against WPE to shut down the whole box that includes WE.
In most of Africa, what we call women empowerment mainly begins with liberation from abuse and ends within the deep drains of same confines of such abuse. This is because the wounds are deep. The kinds of abuses in our part of the world are so endemic and pervasive that they cost billions of dollars of donor money and yet we see little of no changes for the expenses.
Truth is we have been pretending for so long about the sensitivity of the various forms of abuses of women and their attachments – children – until they took deep, remote nooks that rooted into other impossible issue-areas that make it difficult for most campaigns to make headways in getting indicators for their objectives. Now, the problems and nemesis of women abuse are fighting us back, killing us in batches.
The kidnaps, drug abuse, dangerous youth groups threatening our very existence as a people, the ransacks, the homicides, assassinations, group/settlement murder, wanton killings and the many other atrocities we bury in the privacy and secrecy of our families, neighbourhood; the private crime commits are all results of the abuse of the rights of our women.
Confession of the patriarchy and its repentance depends on the acknowledgement of the truth that when we say women WE first mean the need to restore the rights if not privileges of the humans we call mothers, wives, sisters, aunts and daughters who we have left and neglected in lots of positions of varying degrees of hardships.
The rights of women alone cannot be all mentioned here. We will need a book of a million volumes. But the immediate rights include the recognition of their persons and dignity in respect and careful treatment of their issues; providing their biological and physiological needs to support their reproductive wellbeing; their right to correct knowledge and adequate education, even if it is just to help run the family professionally and to train the kids according to the right ways.
WE means no woman anywhere in our society suffers tragedy or dies in the process of fulfilling her biological rights of giving birth, and to ensure her only joy of that process survives the process and lives to term in good health, good nutrition and medical care. It means giving every woman productive ration in nutritious food provision, medical attention, the safety of her environment and to ensure her protection from any kind of fear.
WE means getting the homeless, familyless, helpless, hotel and hawking girls out of the secret social nooks or the streets and get them into schools or something to do to help their lives. It means protecting them from cultural, social, economic, political or patriarchal abuses. It means getting to know their life, their views about life and to monitor what they choose to do in the new life we give them.
WE means protecting the girl from harmful, dangerous and cultural, traditional and social practices that reduce their potentials of wellbeing, reproductive health or their capacity to help society in building strong, productive, responsible families, organisations and raising more potential human resources for the nation.
WE means helping the girl to access good ideas that will help them build their minds in order to guide their hearts right; to broaden their worldview so they can see, observe, learn and improve on what other women in other parts of the world do and what they can do in their own way to improve on other ideas to make them work for their own homes and communities.
WE means getting our daughters educated to a level so they can mobilise, support and encourage themselves and others; to give back to the neighbourhoods, to their communities, to their society; to lead other girls or walk along with them to do something to uplift other dampened spirits; to help the weak, the poor, to ask others to do the right thing and move for women-relevant legislation that can protect women without necessarily overriding the provisions of their faiths.
The abuses, cheating of women and the neglect of women issues happen under roofs, under the regiments of dungeon purdah, in my and your home. We enjoyed the oversights and the ‘manages’. We used religion to confine and tie down our women so they don’t speak; don’t associate; so they don’t compare lifestyles they haven’t seen with theirs and to ask questions.
We then brag about our empty manliness outside the house and tell lies, deny, and swear about, the state of our miserable families and prison homes. We also lie to God in suspending solutions that you lack this and that, dismissing even what God knows has blessed you with.
We failed in responsibility and condemn other efforts that are meant to help us by denying the truth and hiding issues to support the public agenda of the antagonists. This is why, for long, individual, organisational and institutional efforts for the campaigns have suffered many setbacks as a result of the subconscious messages of that misconception, perhaps without much notice of the campaigners themselves: “I don’t have. What do you want me to do? To steal?”
There is a notorious, stubborn thick line of purposive ride on this silent misconception that trails the programmes of women empowerment campaign of many governments and nongovernmental organisations. Thanks to international humanitarian organisations and donor agencies for their magnanimous support to the campaign over the years.
The WE actors have invested huge resources across the nation and the north in particular, which is the minefield of the atrocities, negligence and abuse of women. These resources are in turn wasted by the naivety of the patriarchy in Nigeria, using the button of the “a woman cannot be a leader” notion as advanced by religious and cultural agents of injustice, domination and exploiters at the smallest unit of settlement to the top.
The ignorant, gullible, wayward mass youth in the northern type, who are followers of those dogma agents and also campaign stuff of politicians’ campaign trains, easily take the message ahead. It takes just the above notion to discredit years-old-campaign of a woman politician who has been long a kindgiver, community mobiliser and builder, to crumble on the eve of the campaign.
And there seems to be a running other line of empty charades of attitudes, behaviours and characters that celebrate the little dubious scores that certain cultural, religious and social ceilings made during political campaigns. There are a number of accounts of such cheap scores of orchestrated decampaign of women politicians, induced by the dubious political patriarchy that celebrated certain victories in the last elections.
But no victory is worth a clap until it is clean, pure and popular. The growing awareness the Buhari years have, and will, bring into politics in the next campaign will unleash lots of wrath on the patriarchy. And the whole WE campaign will get a boost that will make many of us sit up as responsible custodians.
That will be a centrepiece of another campaign to make, but meanwhile, some liberated women from abuse, economically okay and politically minded good and kind women will continue to be pushed into the valleys of party and political manoeuvrings of the patriarchy in Nigeria.
There is need for, especially the North to get the idea right and stop using the idea of religious belief that a women’s role in leadership is limited or is not even there as a defence of the cruel, mean character of men. Nothing can justify injustice. Nothing can defend it even in the court of Satan, even.
The long idea that seeks to explain the paddle in the mud for women liberation should now begin to look into this claim in order to find the real issues and redesign their approaches for a renewed campaign programme planning. The main bulk of the message must change. The bulk idea must separate. Let us first deal with women liberation from traditional, cultural and religious dogmas and take women political empowerment last.
And hold! The first pillar on who those responsibilities rest is the individual man – father, husband, brother, uncle or son. It rests on me and you. As long as we live, there is no reason, justification, cover or alternative bear. It is you and me. It is us. Face it. Take it. It is Godgiven. It is divine. It is a lifetime task. It is not negotiable. No helper. No complain. No listener. Face it. Take it. It is only you. It is all by you.
The excuse some of us make in the incapacity of governments to provide amenities or good economy to help you take care of your family is unfortunate, misguided and has no basis in any religious tradition. If a government fails in its responsibility, it is the business of the governor. Make sure you don’t make the second failure. Your responsibility is yours alone. It is different. You each have your own grave.
Neither you nor the governor can bear each other’s responsibility. And if the governor so fails because they are corrupt, you don’t follow to be corrupt. You must not steal to take care of your family. Why you fail is you dependent, waited, expected, all the years for government to help you, perhaps you never knew it was wrong.
Whatever government does for the society is impersonal. It is for all. Government doesn’t address personal needs of citizens. It addresses collective needs. Your personal needs are yours. Take it. Face it. Solve it.
Hassan Alhaji Hassan can be contacted on 08032829772/08050551220 (text only with full names and address)a[email protected]
The views expressed in this article are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect WikkiTimes’ editorial stance.
