Interviews
Still A Lot More To Be Done – Dr. Nosakhare Ikponwosa Aladeselu
Although they will say the party structure, the way the party leadership is, which is not democratic, like now, you have Wike saying he put everybody in office, that doesn’t leave room for others to bring in people, have a voice…
But at least, there is only one Wike in Nigeria and we have 774 local government areas in Nigeria and these 774 LGAs have at least 190 wards! So Wike cannot control all that power. What about the other people? Are they also controlling? Wike is selfish and wicked on his own, just because what he did was not good. You can empower people to become visible but you cannot enslave them. We are not asking of people who will help women and later enslave them. No, there are other people who have helped other men to climb, they have not enslaved them. Some of them (the ones helped) have also been ungrateful to those who put them there. It is a human reaction, but it is not a popular one. There are also people who are grateful. There are people who have looked up to the person that brought them to where they are and they have gone to celebrate them; sometimes they raise a foundation in their names, sometimes they celebrate them when they die. Those things are the ones the media should be portraying so that people will also be encouraged to help others.
Now, the Women Affairs Ministry, what do you think it should be doing to help the women’s cause?
Women Affairs Ministry, should be a melting pot of all the desires, of the actions, all the plans, all the programmes of women in Nigeria. The Ministry of Women Affairs, Abuja should coordinate, collaborate with different state ministries. It should also ensure that the ministries at state level, are not dead, not asleep and should call meetings regularly, collate information from the states regularly. It should have a colloquium of programmes, ideas of outcomes from different states which researchers can also use to tell us about the advancement of women in Nigeria, but, what we see the Ministry doing is, they circulate around Abuja. Today, they are even holding a meeting, they call Edo State person in Abuja, call Delta State person in Abuja, call Cross River person in Abuja and at the end of the day, it is Abuja people that are holding the meeting. These are persons who may not be in touch with the home states. Oftentimes, I go to such meetings, when I get there, before you know it, they say there are five/four people from Edo State. I say, well, only two of us were invited here; they have added other people. Next time when they want to do anything for Edo State, they don’t even need to call us again! They will say abeg, somebody is close by and those are the things that are spoiling the issues.
The political parties are supposed to have gender policies, how
Advocacy. Through advocacy, strong advocacy. Usually, the political parties don’t put their money where their mouth is in the sense that those policies are there. It was the PDP that started it, APC followed when they won. APC came and only those individuals who read the constitution implement it at their own end. I give you an example, the PDP had a gender policy in their constitution for nomination for participation, it was only in the time of Obaseki in Edo State that he asked for five persons to be nominated either to attend a meeting or to be considered for appointment out of which he would take one or two persons. We insisted that out of the five, two must be women. If every state action persons take their party constitution to implement like that, there will be women almost everywhere. The first time this thing was raised was when Obasanjo in 1999, said he sent messages to all the states to nominate women for minister, there were some states that did not nominate one woman at all-half or more than half of the states did not nominate one woman. It was when he called a meeting of women NGOs that he told us this at Sheraton Hotel. So you find that it is a matter of the individual. The party spirit is different, the individual mentality and mode of operation, is different.
If the chairman of a party will want to call for a meeting and he calls mostly all the men and by the time they even ask one woman to come, now they have one woman as women leader in the meeting of about 12 party officials only one woman is there, what voice does she have? More often than not, that woman is a token woman, she does not have a voice, she cannot even challenge if something is going wrong at the meeting. This has put women in bad light. If women’s aspirations are being considered, she will not say anything so long as she gets her small allowance to get back home from the meeting. Those are the things affecting women.
Since women are mainly the voters in elections, shouldn’t we now use that as a negotiation power before elections to state, if we are supporting this party, this is what we want, this is want we want….
That notion has been mooted a couple of times. Why it has not succeeded is that the people with the ideas don’t have the power for the action. Two of us are activists, we say women, women, we are not going to vote. How do you translate that to a woman who is looking for N2000 to buy foodstuff and she gets it before she leaves her house? How is she going to cooperate with you? Two of us are talking, we don’t have what it takes to put any contribution, so what I have done so far has not been contribution? No food on their tables and we are asking them to make that sacrifice for the women that we would not vote for?
You know, it is a very good idea, like I was talking about one woman who was Speaker here, a couple of times, I raised up the mud in the press to organize a press conference to agitate against her oppressors, but the last one, I have even called agitators both in her party and her opposition party, they were willing to say that as long as she is the one they are oppressing, all of us must come out. We want to organize a small rally in front of the state assembly and I said to her, Aunty, we are almost through with our plan, can you bring money for us to try and buy a few things and also give some women some money to go home? She said no, where would she get money, that that is supposed to be our contributions. Eeh, that should be my contribution? It is when I put my own food allowance to project your cause that you will say I have contributed to it? All the one I have been carrying microphone and crying out and everyone is calling me one man riot squad, I have not contributed?
In another situation they said we should have an all-women political party and that was a farce because, society is not formed like that, given that if you were to form an all-women political party, half of them will not follow the cause of that party. And in my development work, I tried to look at what Shell is doing in their different communities, I came across a cooperative society that Shell was funding. A man was the chairman of the cooperative. A man, as head of an all- women cooperative society?
Why was that?
Well, I was not there; maybe because they didn’t have anybody who is educated, they could not even get an educated female or because they could not trust another woman. Why will a woman like me come and be chairman? Some will say, it is even better we have a man so that we know we dey cooperate. So, you want to understand the mentality of women before you try to go for that kind of motion that says let’s have an all-women political party. If you don’t understand how women work, you will just spend your money for nothing. You can do that, after all that, there are about 18 political parties now, if that are becomes one of them. But to say that the women have risen, until it comes to a point where the local women at the grassroots understand what we are raising at the national, we will not have any followers….They may follow you halfway and drop on the way. That has always been the little fear and a problem.
There have been some suggestions that there is no bridge between the grassroots women and the women at the center, the ones at the state and national level and that affecting what has been done for women inclusion.
That is the fact I have just explained, that we who are raising our voices saying, let’s give women a chance, do this, do that, when the time of election comes, that all these women should support this woman for election. And this other woman who gets N2000 to buy some salt and some rice in her family, after collecting that money, she has a conscience. She now develops the conscience and votes for the person who gave, it will be easy but when some people are still looking for how to feed their children, when politics is still at the primordial level in Nigeria, it is going to be difficult. If the average family is self-sufficient economically, self-reliant, and politicians know this, that was how they won election in Ekiti.
In the last election in Ekiti State, the women were swearing , cursing APC- ‘Alah’, APC no go die well! See all, the suffering!’ ‘Tinubu did this, Tinubu did that,’ APC kept quiet. At the time of the election, they were getting N10, 000. Before you know it, one old woman that had not seen N2000 in her hand for almost a whole year saw N10,000. She called her neighbor, “Why are you still at home? A vote is N10,000!” And before you know it, the result changed in expectation. Even the NGO people who were there said it, that what we were expecting the election to produce is not what it produced. That is the problem.
The major thing is that we need to address poverty.
Poverty! We need to address poverty before democracy can make sense. Democracy will not make sense until everybody has the wherewithal to raise their voices. How can you raise your voice when it is against the person who is feeding your family? These are the issues.
It is a pity. So what will you say to our young girls?
Young girls should know that they have a future, the future ahead of them is in their hands to control. But if they will follow the footsteps of their mothers, and draw back and not fight it out with the boys out, there (the boys will continue. The boys have been trained by their fathers to always push ahead. The girls have not been trained by their mothers.
The mothers have not done anything to train the girls to always push ahead even though there are a few fathers today who wouldn’t mind if their daughter is a governor, or in the Senate. All these need to be taught to our girls so that they will know that if they can aspire, there are some people who will support them.
There are some men who are becoming He-for-She, who are supporting that this problem in Nigeria, but it is getting too long, let’s change and see what a woman can do. There are many men and the number of such men is growing by the day. So, we need to tell the young women that if they are able to push, they will get the support in future.
And to those campaigning for more female inclusion? What are some of the things you think that we need to do which we are not yet
For those of us fighting outside the political ring for women inclusion, we are not well served with the right information. Therefore, we are not using the right information, we are not using the right tools to get our advocacy through. I just gave you an example of zoning, if we don’t understand the zoning in the political realm and we are supporting a woman against the tide, we will say Ooh, our advocacy did not work. So those of us who are outside (that was what took me into politics,) I was still in the activism and they said, go inside. The women were telling me, You are always saying women are not trying, the women are not pushing, they are only dancing, clapping. You, come inside’. I said if you ask me to come, I will come. That was why I entered politics in 2003 and today, what I know in politics with my activism, the person who is the president of one NGO or one international NGO, does not have it.
We need to connect with women who are in politics to understand both the language, the intricacies and the dos and don’ts. Oftentimes, they say we use language that some men don’t like to hear; we need to be sensitive in our language. We also need to be sensitive in our demands and also be sure that what we are asking for is in the interest of the people we are working for. Often, we fight for people without asking them, what do you want? Until we go dig gamu halfway you hear, se no send am, na your side we dey o!.So, there is need for synergy between those who are advocating for inclusiveness outside politics to connect with knowledgeable women in the polity-women who have tried, some have failed, some have succeeded. You need to tap from their experiences, from their wisdom, from their failures before you set your own agenda.
That is very fine because, even in ordinary NGO work, if you go to a community and you decide their problem for them, the objective from Abuja, you may be making a huge mistake. We did not talk about visibility. Let us quickly talk about visibility because we want them to come in but, beyond money and a political party, there are things that women should do for themselves.
In the Asaba meeting, I encouraged women who want to take part in politics to become more and more relevant to the needs of their immediate environment. A woman who wants to be a councilor in a ward, that is the smallest political unit which, is also winnable, must be identified by men and women from the ward for her personal resourcefulness. You may not give them money but you can give them your time. If you don’t have time, you can rally around some people to also provide their time to address their needs and source help for them outside. Once they connect you with one benefit, by the time you print your poster, they will campaign for you. That is what we have seen over the years and we expect that for more and more women to become active in politics, they should first all bend down to carry the load before asking for help so that people will help them to put it on their heads. They must develop themselves, must understand their terrain, must have what it takes, must have the poise-when they appear in public, so that people will be able to respect them. Women must be sociable, respectful-that’s what local people enjoy-respect, integrity, dignity, sensitivity. If you are able to connect with them in that wise, they will project you.
Some elections are won not with money but with connection. Have you not heard sometimes in a whole state, one information will just go round-no, we are not voting for this, this is the person we are voting for? That was how Labour Party won in Edo State (2023).
, because of their movement. The movement came eh, there must be a new Nigeria. In Edo State, the people voted in somebody new in Abuja (NASS). They did not know him, before they knew it, their own people who should represent them at the *home/local spot, were affected, disenfranchised, deselected and so, even the strong political party in the state lost to Labour at the National Assembly and even the presidential elections. And it was difficult to get those things back. It was surprising that somebody in Labour is representing Edo State in the House of Representatives because of one little campaign that went round everywhere.
And, usually, it is those who have access to information that will ride with that kind of information so, if you think that that can also be impactful, do something that will make you popular-try and gain popularity from the people you want to represent, that is, your own self-development and get an education. If you are market woman and you want to go to the council, by the time you are almost getting there, somebody, chairman of the party will go and bring his/her daughter who is a graduate but if you are educated, you can read/write and sign memoranda, they will have nothing against you. So as a woman, self-development is prime to political visibility.
When I teach people how to enter into politics, I advise, go and register with a political party in your wardthat is the first thing. Do you know that most of our people, even the NGO people don’t know their ward? For anyone interested in taking part in politics, know your ward, know the political parties in your ward; know the active political parties not the silent ones that are yet to register. Don’t invest unless your popularity is overwhelming. Don’t risk in joining a weak political party that doesn’t have ** in your state. You will think, ooh, I like the name of the party, let me use that to go and print my poster; I don’t want to be mentioning names. But for you to be visible, joining a party that is already strong and that has a solid structure is better. Attend meetings and at each meeting in your ward, when you are active in the ward, someone will nominate you to attend meetings at the state level. Contribute, discuss, contribute effectively in any meeting in the ward; you introduce yourself and contribute wisely. By the time you introduce yourself four to ten times in one ward, people will get to know you.
Many women come to meetings and as they come, they go. But if as an educated woman an issue is raised, you contribute, when you contribute, the chairman of the party will nominate you when they are looking for who will go and speak for the ward at the state level.-That woman that is always saying something-that is how you become visible. Before you know it, you have become a matter. I the two political parties I have operated, I have been the candidate for national election, I have been the national leader in APC, now national leader in the PDP. When you don’t go to meetings to sleep or look for*coke , boyfriend or whatever, you go there and know what you are there for, you focus, concentrate.
Political parties actually recognize persons who have something to offer
When they say the chairman’s father or other person’s burial is coming up, contribute, nothing is too small. Chairman, I don’t have but nothing is too small, take this N2000.
I think women need to hear this. Women need to contribute, I was told this by late Mrs. Victoria Whyte who said when the PDP was raising fund for the Musa Yar’Adua Foundation and men were putting down N1million, she put in N1million too, gives you a voice. Women can’t keep waiting to be receiving, receiving.
Yes. Occasionally, invest. Politics is about investment. I know there are instances who did not invest harvests; somebody invested to make that happen, it doesn’t come from nowhere. You cannot build something on nothing. You may not be the one who invested but somebody invested before you rode on that investment. On your own, you can invest and benefit. Invest your time, invest your resources, invest also your own integrity and if someone says anything that is contrary to whom you are, stand up for yourself, defend yourself. If you don’t defend yourself, that thing will multiply a hundred times-but you were in that meeting and you didn’t say anything. That is how some women suffer from reproach without defending themselves.
Dr thank you so much for this deep conversation.
It has been my pleasure