In the past few weeks, a chain of events, seemingly disparate, took place both in Nigeria and/or about Nigerians.
One was the news that the Nigerian military was going to end the admission of female cadets into the combatant course of the Nigerian Defence Academy. The previous administration launched the initiative, but the present one is stopping it because – as the grapevine has it – some northern Muslims are uncomfortable with the possibility that a woman would one day lead the army and men would have to take orders from her. While the back story cannot be officially confirmed, there has been enough bigotry about this present government to substantiate that account. The President that once stood on the world stage and declared that his own wife belongs to “the other room” exemplifies the chauvinism that drives the engine of Nigerian culture.
As expected, there was a lot of public outrage and the regular evocation of the familiar registers of nepotism in Nigeria –northernisation, Islamisation, etc. The Nigerian Army has expectedly denied that there is any truth in the report. Knowing how previous scandals – from financial corruption that led to mutiny and massacre of innocent civilians ended – they will bury their heads until this storm eventually passes and Nigerians are distracted by another sensation.
Then, there was the story of the 26 women who died on the migrant ship off the Italian coast town of Salerno.
Ironically, in 2015, when Mrs. Aishat Buhari was campaigning for her husband in Edo State, she touched on the subject of human trafficking and European migration issue albeit tactlessly. It has been common knowledge that most of the women who migrate to Europe through abject circumstances come from that part of Nigeria. However, considering how things have fallen apart in the past two years, Nigerians from other parts of the country have joined the hustle through the belly of a whale to be delivered – if they are lucky – into the city of lights. Interestingly, since the death of the 26 women, the First Lady has not thought of lending her voice following the promises she made during the 2015 campaign. Today, Mrs. Buhari’s highest social intervention project is whining to the public about the poverty of infrastructure in the Aso Rock Clinic that caters for the ruling class. Never mind that the hospital typically gets more money than the hospitals millions of Nigerians are condemned to access.
The person who has been carrying the can on the issue is the Senior Special Adviser on Foreign Affairs and the Diaspora, Abike Dabiri-Erewa. After her initial misstatement and the furious damage control she attempted on Twitter, Dabiri-Erewa appeared on TV and complained that Nigerian officials failed to attend the unfortunate girls’ burial because they were blindsided by Italian officials. By implication, she revealed that Nigeria planned to participate in the funeral as guests, not as the bereaved.
As things go in Nigeria, the burial of the girls is the final episode in that tragedy. Forget the promises of our leaders who have sworn to investigate. From now on, those girls are reference points.
Third, the Inspector-General of Police, Ibrahim Idris, was accused of having amorous affairs with female subordinates. According to his accuser, he allegedly gave the women undeserved promotion, he even impregnated one of them. To cover up the shame, he had to marry her. And what was the IG’s response? He claimed that no law stops him from having an affair with his subordinates. The thought of the police boss who does not recognise professional ethics is frightening. If Idris had ethical awareness about power and responsibility, he would not be insisting on his supposed right to pursue women whose responses to his sexual advances could make or break their career in the police organisation. If the IG is not driven by a basic sense of responsibility, his lack of professional ethics will affect his dispensation of his duties and the way the police organisation under his watch is structured. Would such a person ever fight against female sexual harassment in the police?
These three incidents, taken together, bring one to an inevitable and painful conclusion: there is really no moral essence to the legal and political structures on which this country hangs. The laws are not only weak, they also lack internal virtue. There is no guiding ideology or an overarching philosophy that defines the contours of our supposed citizenship. We are inhabitants of the Nigerian space, but we barely have any claims to the political and cultural ideals of citizenship which should guarantee the principles and values by which we are ruled, and the moral obligation and expectations that we can demand of Nigeria.
Instead, we are ruled on the whims and caprices of parochial men whose sole claim to leadership authority is the accident of being at the right place at the right time. The men sit in high places and from there, parcel out bite-size privileges to the rest of us according to the sizes of their nepotism. Even the so-called progressive ideas an administration executes are often more about fanciful showings than those grounded in thought or a moral vision. When they are succeeded by another government, that one – lacking a clue why those ideas are essential building blocks of democracy – unravels its predecessor’s achievements.
Unfortunately, because the political club that cuts and distributes the national cake is male-dominated, women are usually at the receiving end of the patriarchal power and forces of principalities that rule Nigeria. Under Muhammadu Buhari’s administration, the political space has further shrunk to an old boys’ club. Images of the President’s trips abroad and those of people who surround him are composed of mostly men – aging oldies with a befuddling sense of entitlement. They decide who gets which privileges and their treatment of women under this asymmetric arrangement is a form of svengalism. Women, to them, are not citizens with equal rights, privileges, and responsibilities but an afterthought whose uses are determined by their patriarchal impulses. We are ruled by men like Senator Bukar Ibrahim who, as governor of Yobe State, inaugurated Sharia law – with its strict puritan codes on sexual morality. Yet, he was reported the last time as taking down his trousers before women in a “short-time” motel. I suppose he would also be one of those who will think it is an aberration for a woman to give orders to a man?
The other part is that even women who exploit gender-based issues during elections when they campaign for either themselves or their husbands end up in power servicing the same patriarchal power structure. Occasionally, women run the women’s unit of their political organisation (because they would not be allowed to run the mainstream affairs where men dominate) but that is almost as far as it goes. Pushing for women’s rights goes beyond superficial affirmative action programmes that merely increase the margin of women’s representation but still fail to take them seriously as equal partners in the Nigerian project. Women are not to be “gifted” privileges and positions, neither should issues that imperil them be subject to an offhand treatment that does not address the question of their citizenship.
When a society descends to the level where the police IG declares no law bars him from slaughtering and eating any sheep in his fold, we should be worried that our country lacks basic normative principles that ought to guide public moral codes. It does not matter if the IG eventually married the woman he had an affair with or not, or whether Islamic laws permit him to sow his oats wherever he chose, it is wrong for a boss to make advances towards their subordinate and that Nigeria is allowing such a perfidy to stand shows how lax we are on issues of human rights and citizenship privileges for women.
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