The Senate on Tuesday rejected the gender equality bill which seeks to guarantee equal rights for women in marriage, education and jobs, protects widows against regressive socio-cultural practices and guarantees that they inherit their jointly acquired property when their husbands die, among others.
Moreover, titled: “A bill for an Act to Incorporate and Enforce Certain Provisions of the United Nations Convention on the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women, the Protocol of the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights, and other matters connected therewith, 2016 (SB. 116),” its passage will domesticate the UN Convention on prevention of violence and gender discrimination against women.
But Senator Abiodun Olujimi (PDP, Ekiti South), its sponsor, made the mistake of telling the male-dominated Chamber that the bill seeks equal rights for women in marriage, education and jobs, promote gender parity and empower them politically and socio-economically as well as in matters of divorce, protection of widowhood and inheritance rights.
Entrenching these worthwhile causes in legislation merits support. But given the religious, cultural and traditional norms in many of the country’s 369 ethnic groups in the 180 million population, the head-on clash leading to its rejection was predictable, even if not acceptable. Hence the blame for the rejection must first go to the sponsors who equated its passage with running a 100-metre dash rather than the marathon slow, enlightenment process its acceptance would require.
For, religious and cultural values are the psychological totem poles which sustain individuals, groups and societal norms worldwide. To change them requires more sensitivity than rational, intellectual argumentation demands. The sponsors did not display the sensitivity when presenting their bill whose contents they assumed were very obvious even to the blind…. Or should be.
But the 1999 Constitution already has adequate guarantees for the rights of all Nigerians regardless of gender, the opponents argued, and they were at sea with disbelief. So did many of their supporters take to social media to insult and castigate the bill’s opponents, virtually stopping short of branding them male chauvinists.
No doubt, all cultural beliefs and traditional practices which are detrimental to the health, well-being and happiness of women need to be declared archaic. Thus, cliterectomy, or euphoniously, female genital mutilation, is one of such uncivilised cultural practices. It was entrenched in society as a primitive antidote to female prostitution, flirtation and marital infidelity. Modernity has proved that the assumption is false. But canvassing for its eradication requires more than legislation.
Its gradual change by informed parents shielding their daughters from it is gradually diffusing more effectively through inter-personal communication channels by significant opinion leaders than by mass communication. And such anti-clitorectomy messages are diffusing in the society in several zones, albeit slowly.
So also are messages targetted against early girl-child marriages though they are still rampant especially in Muslim North. Similarly, in Christian South, pushing young girls into prostitution by poor parents to cater for their siblings is an equally reprehensible practice being preached against. The assumption is that girls below 18, the age of informed consent, have no idea about the demands of marriage. And now, giving them equality with their husbands rather imposes an extra burden.
It is objectionable that some family heads still query the right of young girls to receive equal education as their male age-mates. In fact, all the relevant research on formal education for young girls conclude positively that the extra years they spend in school prepares them for better jobs, informed choice of spouses, informed spacing of childbirth, better care of their families, including children and husbands in marriage. These are laudable social and gender benefits nobody would object to.
On the contrary, some cultural practices against widows are so demeaning that they deserve to be scrapped by fiat even before legislation to seal their fate: Widow’s heads are scraped with snail pods, they drink the corpse’s bath-water to prove that they had no hand in poisoning the husband, they are driven out of their marital homes with their children by aggrieved in-laws; these are the horror films which marital rights advocates want to legislate into societal norms. But they need the relevant persuasive communication indispensable for the change of attitude towards the change.
Questions persist about violence against the weaker sex in marriage. The authorities must provide shelter for the victims even prior to legislation. It flares up in marriages just as in other social interactions – depending on temper and temperament. How to manage the flare-up makes the difference between a successful marriage and a street pick-up or, rife as it is in Lagos, instant “ashiawo-hotel” unions. Solving such problems require more education of the entire society about courtship, friendship and amorous relations prior to marriage to ensure compatibility before formal consummation of the union. Some argue that violence against women is merely a reflection of their comportment towards their husbands than an embedded monstrosity in men against their wives.
These are hardly issues one would legislate into the body of laws without adequate enlightenment of the relevant target populations. Some opponents may not even be aware that the bill is not about comparing the equality or otherwise of men and women in marriage. In fact, the sponsors must contact National Orientation Agency (NOA) and other media houses to undertake the relevant public education programmes to pave way for the proposed re-presentation of the bill to the Senate.
That should be the first task of the sponsors. Unless they want their Senate colleagues to override the “harmless opposition” and the approved bill becomes a rallying point for protests, objections and even violent street demonstrations against it.
Advanced countries have already legislated it. Hoping to domesticate it because it got global ratification for a UN Convention is also the faux pas of the sponsors. Legislating it overnight makes the bill more revolutionary than evolving cultural norms can adjust to it. The sponsors’ first homework is to move the evolution process in tandem with legislating it. Otherwise, no amount of name-calling, insults and deprecating remarks against the opponents will yield any benefit. Perhaps rather, it would backfire, concretise the confrontational rectitude of their opposition to its passage.