AFFIRMATIVE ACTION FOR WOMEN

It is inevitable that our women folk must be adequately involved in politics, writes Josef Omorotionmwan

Admittedly, our male-dominated National Assembly would have nothing to do with any issue of women liberation. In their own self-interest, they would rather maintain the status quo – ask the women to play catch-up, knowing too well that catch up, they never will.

This is, however, not yet a petition. Rather, it is an appeal to the men’s reason and a change of mind. It is an Agendum for Legislative Action, particularly in this season of constitutional amendments.

In this essay, an attempt shall be made to offer some rationale in support of the stand that on the issue of women liberation, Affirmative Action is the only option. We shall proceed from there to offer remedial steps necessary for the Affirmative Actions.

The month of March every year is devoted to the female folks worldwide. This comes with mixed feelings: In the more advanced democracies the month is spent in the celebration of women and their advancement. But in Nigeria, it is spent on lamentations over the incremental decline in the fortune of our women vis-a-vis their forays into politics and public life.

Which country ever short-changes itself the way Nigeria does? We approach every major election by constructively eliminating more than 50% of our potent population (women) from the contest. Which country goes to war by first killing off 50% of its fighting force? Wittingly or unwittingly, that’s what Nigeria does.

In the 2023 Election Cycle, Nigeria almost produced its first female State Governor, albeit by default. What we saw in Adamawa State was that even in Nigeria, illegality is male by birth. Even in a country where most elections are stolen, the attempt to smuggle in Senator Aishat Dahiru Binani fell flat at the door steps of illegality, no thanks to the clumsiness of the male politicians who were by gender, supposed to be the fixers.

It is still a tale of the man and the dog. When a dog bites a man, it is no news but if a man bites a dog, it hits the headline. When a man steals an election in Nigeria, it is normal; but let the woman try it, the attempt will flop before it begins. The man soon becomes the fixer!

So it is in Nigeria that over the years, men have dominated the political space almost to the total exclusion of women. Women are not asking for parity with men. They are asking for adequate representation. We claim in the abstraction that people are born free, but they are everywhere in chains. Until recently, the woman’s place in Nigeria was in the kitchen.

Women were bogusly labeled homemakers – only expected to go to church and pray for the family; come home and cook the meals; and stay at home to take care of the children. Slightly above that level – particularly in the rural areas – women were “beasts of burden”. They went to the farm to fetch food items and the firewood with which to cook them. They went to far away rivers in search of water for domestic services.

In the beginning, although we realized that education was a major driving force for development, women were denied access to it. The few women who went to school were given access to restricted areas – while their male counterparts went to engineering schools, they went for typing and secretarial studies.

Many people of goodwill have been in the vanguard, agitating for the abolition of discrimination against women. 

For the former President of Tanzania, Julius Nyerere, “the two legs on which any nation should stand and walk or run are its manhood and womanhood”. On his part, the former President of the United States of America, Barack Obama, once carried the fight for the liberation of the African women on his head. Obama advised that Africans can no longer pay mere lip service to women’s liberation and that the time had come to do away with archaic practices that dehumanize the African woman. He stressed the need for total inclusion of women in every aspect of development for greater impact. For Obama, “The single best indicator of whether a nation will succeed is how it treats its women… Nobody would put out a football team and just play half the team.”

In all this, there is no alternative to meaningful affirmative action and compensatory justice for women. It is not enough to tell women that they are now free to compete on equal footing with men. That would simply be like being engaged in a marathon race in which some of the runners are forcibly held back at the starting line, until the other runners have passed the half way mark.

Affirmative action or preferential treatment enjoys full support from the fact that it is required by justice in order to atone for past wrongs. It makes sense for anyone ordering an offender to cease discriminating, to also make compensatory award for previous injuries. There is no reason why a society that has discriminated against women for so long should not be required to make what is at best a most modest compensation for past wrongs.

We have heard of political parties in Nigeria priding themselves for waiving the nomination fees for female aspirants. This is benign tokenism and it simply begs the question. We do not know of any serious aspirant to a position whose only handicap is that she cannot afford the nomination fee.

The womenfolk should not be satisfied with any Greek gift that costs society nothing. The goals of gender balance cannot be attained if we do not adopt the type of measures that have been adopted in places like the United Nations, Kenya, etc. The Kenyan Constitution provides that no gender shall occupy more than two-thirds of the positions in any government department. At the United Nations, where male and female candidates are equally qualified for a position, the female candidate gets automatic preference. 

THE PAIR THAT WORKS WONDERS:

We recommend a situation where candidates for principal positions are compelled by law to have the opposite gender as running mates. Under such an arrangement, at no time will you have the female-folk totally missing from governance.

We notice with sadness and a deep sense of loss that in the Ninth National Assembly, a measure commonly referred to as the gender bill strayed into the assembly and the male-dominated legislature tossed the bill out of the window with the left hand. This bill was one bold measure that attempted to bring affirmative action for women in our legislatures. We urge the 10th National Assembly to include that measure into the ongoing Constitutional Amendments.

Sadly, self-hatred among women is endemic, with the result that the few of them who have made it, choose only to identify with men. This must change!

Having gone round, there is no escaping the inevitable conclusion that if we must go forward, our women folk must be adequately involved in politics. That’s the way the civilized world is going. Shall we continue to be left behind?

Omorotionmwan writes from Canada