Last Sunday, I stumbled on a programme on ABS (radio) Awka, discussing (Nigerian) women. The bit I heard was very complimentary of mothers. It was all mothers this and mothers that. I don’t know who was on the panel because I started listening late, but there were at least two men and one woman. The woman was apparently a leader of some women’s group. Anyway, after praising mothers, they opened the lines for the audience to call in. The first caller- a man- thanked them for a brilliant programme. And yes, he agreed, mothers are important and so on and so forth. Second caller -also a man- wanted to get a few things off his chest:
The first was that Nigerian women agitating for 35 per cent of political appointments wasn’t serious because did they see what happened at (Prof.) Soludo’s swearing in? He stopped to laugh. Did they see women slapping each other? How could women hold political appointments if all they’d do is go there (biko don’t ask me where ‘there’ is) and just be slapping each other. Some more hahas.
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The second thing he wanted to say- and this issue really breaks his heart, keeps him up at night etc etc.- was that women shouldn’t be drinking beer in beer parlours. Tufia! He’s seen these women, chugging beer alongside men, competing with men, bottle for bottle. These daughters of Jezebel. Please, could the government step in and do something about it? I’m not making any of this up, I promise you. Not only did this man say that the fact of adult women he did not know sitting down in pubs drinking beer bothered him, he also wanted the government to step in and take away their rights to do so. Before he hung up, he added that should he ever catch his wife at a beer parlour (drinking beer), he’d send her home to her people. Odikwaegwu!
I was still laughing at the sheer idiocy of this when the male panellists on the programme – who’d laughed and agreed with him, and both of whom had interjected at different times that ah women fight everywhere, the market, on the streets – asked the sole woman to respond to the caller. Did she think women should be allowed near positions of power? Would they not be too busy fighting to actually do anything? And how did she think the ’menace’ of women drinking in beer parlours could be handled?
This woman whose name I did not catch, or the organisation she represents, and who appeared to have been quiet all along started off really splendidly. She reminded these men that menfolk fight too. Have you seen where men are exchanging blows? She asked. Her male co-panellists agreed that true, men fought too, it wasn’t only women who did. She might have made a funny comment or two about men fighting and she really should have stopped there because she quickly went downhill from there. Besides, she said, the women involved in the incident referenced by the caller were not politicians. They were “the wife of a warlord” and the “former first lady” who seemed to have a “longstanding beef” that exploded at the swearing in ceremony. And because they were not politicians, they shouldn’t be used to judge whether or not women should hold political appointments. So, so much to unpack here but that’s another op-ed on its own.
And as for the second issue, she wholeheartedly condemned women drinking in beer parlours. She did not like to see it at all. “As a person, I condemn it but I found out that most of these women are being taken to the beer parlour by their husbands. Will I now as a woman leader tell the woman to stop going?” Men, she pleaded, should stop taking their wives to beer parlours. “What if the wives insist on going?” one of the male panellists asked. What if the men can’t control their wives? Then the man has bigger issues, the women’s leader said. Why is he a husband if he can’t control his wife? “Whatever a woman is, even if she’s the president, she’s under her husband.” Kai! And as so often happens with these kind of people, she used herself as an example. Apparently, when she goes to her father (every woman) or to her husband, she has to bend down to show respect. “A woman must be regulated.” And so, she was begging husbands to ‘regulate’ their wives and save the society from doom.
This level of discussion from both the panellists and the callers, coming almost on the heels of International Women’s Day was a shocking reminder of just how much work there still is to be done in Naija to dismantle patriarchy. Aluta continua, my people.
