Before the Aba riot, women as freeborn Nigerian adults played well their gender roles especially as daughters, sisters, wives, and mothers. The Aba Women’s Riot was a new music to which women created a new dance. The dance saw women gyrating to better life drumbeats as they took up roles in every facet and various levels of development in Nigeria. The hands that knew to care, the knees that knew to pray, the eyes that knew to wait, the hands that knew to supplicate took up arms, pens, typewriters, telephones and courageously paid the price for emancipation.
The struggle that began in the hearts of a few and metamorphosed into the emancipation of women, before and after independence, is a story that encapsulates the contributions of women to the entity called Nigeria. The individual and communal spirits of women carved a better future and transformed people as they worked together and for each other.
Their stories; their tears, their labour, their struggles, and their courage capture the very essence of their personal and shared experiences and brought us face to face with the fact that development, with its turns, curves and trajectories, is possible with women as partners. The impact made by these women served as a blueprint for positive social change and helped women – educated and uneducated, rich and poor, able and handicapped – to position themselves as change agents. Indeed their joy, laughter and achievements, make this International Women’s Day significant.
Their stories; their tears, their labour, their struggles, and their courage capture the very essence of their personal and shared experiences and brought us face to face with the fact that development, with its turns, curves and trajectories, is possible with women as partners. The impact made by these women served as a blueprint for positive social change and helped women – educated and uneducated, rich and poor, able and handicapped – to position themselves as change agents. Indeed their joy, laughter and achievements, make this International Women’s Day significant.
Yet, I question the 2013* theme, “A Promise is a Promise: Time for Action to End Violence Against Women". Who made the promise? What promise? To whom was the promise made? Why was the promise made? When and where is the promise to be fulfilled?
We seem to forget that a right is a legal, social and ethical principle of entitlement fundamental to the existence and freedom of humans. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Rights structure the form of governments, the content of laws, and the shape of morality as it is currently perceived.” Rights are inalienable except the subject has run foul of the law. Why then do we continue to fight for, maliciously compete and claim the rights that rightly belong to us?
Today, women can be seen in all facets of national development – sports, health, education, legal, social, arts, culture, social, legal, tourism, media, entertainment, economic, etc. In Nigeria, women are deputy governors, ministers, ambassadors, vice-chancellors, bank executives, commissioners, though only for a short while, a woman even rose to become the Speaker of the House of Representatives. The baton of female leadership has been passed down from one generation to the other; whether the fire burns with the same flame is a question to be answered but we continue to clamour for rights we rightly own.
We have made all these strides but our rights as equal players in development are still not upheld. Many years ago, I wrote an article, “Beijing is not the answer”. I feel very much what I felt then. A proverb says, those who live in glass houses should not throw stones. Another says, if we throw stones in the marketplace, it can hit a relation? If we raise bullies, why then do we cry wolf when another person’s daughter suffers the pain of abuse? If we raise thieves, why then do we grieve when the arms they bear silence another life? If we raise prostitutes, why then do we lament the woes that HIV/AIDS and other diseases have brought to our doorstep? If we raise terrorists, why then do we groan under the weight of the economic effect of spending hard earned money to safeguard our borders? If we raise touts, why then do we cringe from the extortionists whiplash?
Our most important role as supporters and nurturers is crying for help. In every nook and cranny, from Nigeria to Nicaragua, girls are being born and it is our duty to nurture them. We must teach our children – male and female, to believe in God and believe in their innate strength to be good and do good to self and others. We must use our compassionate heart to heal wounds, bind broken cords, mend fences, erase racial bias, wipe out segregation and combat discrimination.
Our most important role as supporters and nurturers is crying for help. In every nook and cranny, from Nigeria to Nicaragua, girls are being born and it is our duty to nurture them. We must teach our children – male and female, to believe in God and believe in their innate strength to be good and do good to self and others. We must use our compassionate heart to heal wounds, bind broken cords, mend fences, erase racial bias, wipe out segregation and combat discrimination.
The men and women, who steal from national coffers, engage in child prostitution and trafficking, abuse the rule of law, could have been moulded otherwise if women paid better attention to their calling as mentors and mothers; pillars of strength in the home, the nation and the world. Decrees may be made, laws may be signed but the solution lies in the lives we nurture. We cannot afford to abandon leprosy to save eczema. We must shy away from playing the game as men. Life is not a game and we are not men! Our delicate hearts of compassion and care must flow through the sacrifice we elect to make to save the souls of children.
Josette Shiner, former managing editor of The Washington Times, noted in her speech, “The Role of Women in the 21st Century”, that a recent survey of the top 100 Hollywood producers who determine much of what is played globally reveal the following:
93 per cent never attend religious services
75 per cent are left-of-centre politically
80 per cent see nothing wrong in homosexual relations
More than half said they do not regard adultery as wrong
Two-thirds feel it is their job to promote these ideas and their vision of the world through the media.
As such, we cannot afford to delegate our role as mind builders to the media. We must rise up as champions to guide the lives in our areas of influence.
A promise is a promise and indeed the time for action is now! We cannot sit and let men make promises whether of tangible or transient things; we must make promises to ourselves and generations unborn. A promise to keep the home, the community and the nation free from violence; we owe it to God and posterity to do so. The time to fulfil the promise is now and we need no decree or law to empower us to bring up children in the right way – respectful, morally conscious, dedicated to hard work and God-fearing.
On a day like this, women are urged to be tougher, fight harder, claim rights… But I call on you, my dear sister, to use your natural abilities to stem the tide of conflicts and fill the gaps in moral upbringing; a morally bankrupt nation will soon drag all its earnings through the mud of decadence. We must continue to be active not as competitors but partners and participants in all facets of life. To protect the nation we have painstakingly built, we must be counted as bricklayers, working tirelessly to fill the cracks in our homes and communities.
Will you be counted?
This piece by Omolola Omoteso Famuyiwa first appeared in the Punch Newspaper of March 8, 2013
*2014 Theme: Equality for Women is Progress for all
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