AFFIRMATIVE ACTION: A GENDER PERSPECTIVE - AUTHOR: DR. KAYODE ADENIRAN OMOJUWA

The paper situates the relevance of affirmative action in history, when society became classed to exclude others through the erection of barriers. Society evolved a system of patriarchy which subordinates the woman to man. That was carried on to contemporary times.
There are gender-based barriers erected from institutions of religion, culture and the environment.
The possibility of correcting barriers against women through radical (Marxian) overthrow of the old order, or through the liberal approach of affirmative action, which was used to address issues of marginalisation in the United States and elsewhere. It is backed by legislation and uses various approaches to attempt redress.
Nigeria applies constitutional approach to address the subject and to attempt balancing of appointments on geo-political basis, but is silent on gender balancing and hence the need for affirmative action. The thrust is to confront through intellectual discourse and advocacy the structures of institutions and cultural practices, which engender discrimination against women in job placement, political representation and in other spheres.
The writer demands for constitutional provisions that will address and strengthen affirmative action, citing the example, of the Swedish Constitution, which guarantees a near 50-50 male-female participation in governance.
 
CONCLUSION
There should be definite constitutional provisions to cut down the influence of traditional institutions, which are barriers to the emancipation of womanhood on all fronts.

EQUITY FOR WOMEN UNDER SHARIA LAW IN NIGERIA

EQUITY FOR WOMEN UNDER SHARIA LAW IN NIGERIA
The religion of Islam and its basic and immutable source of laws (Qur’an) have made abundant provisions that bestow on women quality status and role though a regime of rights not enjoyed by them hitherto to its advent fourteen hundred years ago. These rights were reinforced by the Hadith (actions and sayings of the Prophet [PBUH]) as the exemplary lifestyle adherents of the religion of Islam are enjoined to emulate. Over the years concern and dialogue on the provisions of Shari’a law and the extent to which they support, respect, and protect women’s rights has remained a central focus in global and national human rights discourse. This is in the light of perceived and real limitations to the enjoyment of specific rights in different jurisdictions of the Islamic world. There is also the non-commitment to international laws on women’s rights by many countries (especially Muslim ones) where the laws are perceived as an imposition aimed at adulterating the religion of Islam. Overall, the gap between the theoretical provisions for women’s rights and the practical enjoyment of those rights is so wide to give credence to the perception that it is Islam (Shari’a) and not the inherent cultural, economic and political bearings that impair the enjoyment of women’s rights under Shair’a. Furthermore, the concerns of women’s rights activists cannot be dismissed in the face of an acute low level of education (Islamic and western) among Muslim women, their near absence in public life, and their weak bargaining position in power relations arising from poverty and ignorance among other militating factors. A major concern for women’s rights under Shari’a lies in the deficiencies in the observance and administration of Islamic personal law in many jurisdictions. Provision in Muslim family laws are blatantly violated, denied or ignored due to the factors mentioned above. Key areas of concern include women’s rights to determine the terms and conditions in their marriage contract, their right to welfare and equity especially in polygamy, their right to enjoy inheritance especially to assist in cushioning the hard effects of the loss of husband or father, their right to public life and economic engagement as a means of empowerment and contribution to the well-being of their families and communities.

As a contribution in the struggle, the author of this paper has comprehensive the status of women under Shari’a and also elaborated on the fundamental and unique rights conferred on them. The equality of women and men before Allah has been clearly presented. Excellent and factual references have been made to points of equality in deeds, punishment and reward without prejudice to either sex thereby emphasizing the element of equality while drawing attention to assigned roles from the point of partnership and of subjugation or superiority of one over the other. The paper also provides a rich comparative perspective of the practice of Shari’a and the efforts made at reforms in many jurisdictions. Finally, the paper confronts the areas of “misunderstanding” or “distortion” of specific provisions in Islamic law pointing to the need for activists to appreciate the principles that inform them. The paper argues finality in the provisions in these areas justifying that with the immutable position of the Qur’an, and laying emphasis on the nature and abilities of women and men as well as the roles prescribed for them by Allah. The paper offers a position of “safety” for women’s rights under Shari’a in Nigeria and concludes with a proposal for possible reforms, as done in other Shari’a jurisdictions that have common cultural and development backgrounds with Nigeria.

Other initiatives that will assist towards a change in the present status include sustained advocacy by eminent Islamic scholars, jurist and activists towards attitudinal reorientation and legal reforms for a demarcation between cultural prejudices and the clear provisions of Islam. Other proposals must address an open dialogue to remove misconceptions about the religion of Islam and its provisions for its adherents especially women. Furthermore, areas of compatibility and divergence between Islamic and International law must be identified to curtail the wholesome rejection of all provisions by such laws by Muslim. This is possible against the widely respected position of the principles of equity and justice in all interactions in Islam. Meanwhile, the implementation of Shari’a law will be assisted significantly by a broader study of all the schools of Islamic jurisprudence for application as appropriate and with final benefit to the weak and vulnerable in society. Overall, stakeholders concerned with the need for change in the level of enjoyment of women’s rights in Nigeria especially in the Shari’a states must engage in continuous education, advocacy and agitation for the implementation of women’s rights in accordance with the Islamic principles of justice and equality for all human beings.

FEDERALISM AND THE CHALLENGE OF CITIZENSHIP IN NIGERIA'S MULTI ETHNIC STATE

OVERSIGHT Institutions are Commissions either created by the Constitution or empanelled by the executive to carry out certain assignment or supervise certain activities of government. For example, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), the Independent Corrupt Practices Commission (ICPC), the Federal Character Commission (FCC) and the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC).

These institutions are given specific roles and assignments to carry out in accordance with the terms of reference allotted them in the Constitution or instrument setting them up.

By the time these bodies were empowered by the Constitution to carry out their responsibilities there were requirements for such assignments. For instance, INEC is to register political parties, regulate conduct of elections and supervise elections. ICPC is put in place to address issues of Corruption. The FCC has the responsibility to ensure equity and balance in the distribution of opportunities for employment among the component units in the federation. The NHRC is to gauge the human rights situation in the country, given the background of violations during military rule.

Political environment limits efficiency and effectiveness of these bodies. The constitution is limited and therefore, these bodies cannot operate in their full capacity. Also lack of funds and executive interference reduces the independence of these bodies. To be effective, Oversight bodies require legislative backing, independence and a truly democratic political environment.

More Oversight institutions will be needed as the political environment attains maturity this will depend on the amount of reform that goes into the constitution. Gender equality will require a more radical approach to the fundamental issues of reform of the constitution and civic rights.

Political leaders in Africa wield unrestrained powers, which alienates then from the governed. The result is that democracy lacks participation and development is not sufficient.

However, a new social contract that could make governance more accountable can be glimpsed from the experiences of South Africa and Eritrea where serious attempts have been made to check excesses of political leaders through empowerment of oversight institutions.

Accountability has been absent in Africa and Third World democracies not because there are no oversight institutions but because the legal and constitutional framework are defective. In Nigeria, for instance, there are a lot of such bodies but they are not effective.

Also, most of these institutions across Africa are dominated by executive control, which limits their ability to ask questions and demand accountability. Assistance has come in the form of technical support and funds from international donor agencies to help strengthen the capacity of these institutions. Care should be taken here so that initiative is also not borrowed from abroad.

The South African experience of vibrant oversight institutions is predicated on its long history of anti-apartheid struggles and the safeguards that have emerged. This pattern of nationalist influence impact on other polities in Africa in different measures. In Eritrea, the participation of women in the struggle for independence accords women a substantial amount of participation in the post-independent society. Similarly, in Uganda and Ethiopia where the mass of people participated in democratic reforms, the impact on capacities of oversight institutions is positive. This is different from the Nigerian experience where very little participation by the people in constitutional reforms continues to alienate the mass of people from playing roles of watchdogs.

In Eritrea and South Africa, Fundamental changes have empowered the people to make the leadership answerable. Independent institutions are constitutionally empowered to question the leadership. Yet, there are rooms for improvement and there are lessons to be learned by other African countries. For instance, the civil society has to be up and doing by partnering to make clear and bold definitions of terms and goals.

In the long tedious journey to women’s emancipation, multifarious activities were and are being utilized: propaganda, petition, lobby, demonstration, civil disturbance, picket, direct action, affirmative action, infiltration and alliances to being success to the campaigns.

Gender And Development Action (GADA) has reached a stage of articulating the positions to be canvassed. This needs reformulation of data in order to strengthen the arguments for the struggle.

The struggle thus far has gone beyond the vote and legislative mention for citizenship, electoral and political rights. The struggle now contains economic rights. These are to be fermented in the fields of more direct women participation or interest; in matters of labour and living.

They deal with agricultural processing, soil preparation, potable water, primary health care, food security, family planning, solid waste disposal, cooperative thrift societies, and appropriate technology to ease domestic and production functions for the women participants.

This introductory essay is an eye opener. It posits that the omission of gender in resource allocation has exposed women to more grinding poverty. The grievous absence of allocation from the public purse for women’s interests is thinly disguised in many discourses about women resources. Before this GADA publication, resource allocation discourse was mainly to balance ethnic/regional divides and not social chasms.

The social chasm is not considered grave, whereas it is the more decisive one. Copious citations illustrate this on several indicators of economic performance and contribution of the sizable women population at work in rural as well as urban and domestic chores.

Ideological manipulation assists political repression as already proven by a leading social science authority on gender in Africa, Ayesha Imam. This essay on resource allocation and gender supports Ayesha’s standpoint.

We not only note but also observe the repercussion of scanty female representations within areas of their more decisive economic contribution. That is to be expected for social relations remain the precondition of sustainable development, in all community or national affairs.

On issues of child marriage and women benefiting directly from investments, traditional and religious family laws are antagonistic to women gaining due benefits. The women’s liberation movement thus has gigantic work to do more. This essay is a usable expose in the armoury for correcting the imbalance of economic relations against women.

The historical analogy adopted by the writer in this monograph is a very useful approach to contextualising discussions around Sharia in Nigeria. It must be acknowledged that the application of Shaira as Muslim laws in what was to later become Northern Nigeria predates colonial rule and believe in Islam was not just considered a religious obligation for a good Muslim but also a politico legal framework, Islam itself being more a way of life than just a religion.

Approaching the issue from a gender perspective however raises certain debates, one may ask the question whether interference of the colonial system with the Shaira process in Nigeria has delayed its maturity and raised the sensitivity level of certain custodians of Islamic values as to make them more politically conscious, or maybe it has ameliorated the potential for the violation of human rights, women’s human rights in particular. What is agreed amongst women activists however is that the Islam is a gender responsive religion as attested to by the guarantee of women’s human rights as stated in the Qur’an. However processes of interpretation by a patriarchal culture and the juxtaposing of divine (immutable) laws with religious (socially devised) laws as Sharia has eroded the rights of women. While divine injunctions maybe an integral part of Shaira law, what is regarded as Sharia law today is a fusion of the divine and societal interpretations and perceptions of what is regarded as necessary for the community to endure. This is usually a product of historical evolution. Therefore what is applied as Sharia law can and does differ from place to place. More importantly, it allows for discretion, compassion, equity and scientific reasoning. The real challenge we face today as always, is that for religion to remain relevant, it must be responsive to environmental context and dynamics as demonstrated by the analogies in this monograph.

Issues of women rights have always been on the front burner, even if the results of efforts preceding the Beijing Conference do not reflect the amount of energy put into the movements that have tried to situate women in a more advantageous position.

The Beijing Conference was not in any way an awakening event for the Nigerian women; rather it was at best a rekindling of the spirit. The Egba women riot and the Aba women revolt were some of the instances of women in Nigeria rising up in defence of their rights. Such women as Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, Margaret Ekpo and Sawaba Gambo did not attain public recognition through the magnanimity of the men folk or some state tokenism towards women, but rather through their efforts at giving a voice to women.

As in the case of other movements, geared towards liberating a set or group of people, the forces that seek to maintain the status quo always find means of reducing the impact of such movements if not vilifying it. Not only have there been instances of putting down the women effort with sheer brutal force, the movements have also been given less prominence than it deserves in history. In Nigeria, the role assigned to women in the public domain does not reflect their input into the various battles that led to the emergence of the Nigerian state and the many marches against tyranny in our land. Neither does it reflect the fact of their having fought their rights battle long before Beijing.

Dr. O.B.C. Nwolise’s The Role of Oversight Institutions in Handling Gender Sensitive Issues establishes the rights of these previous efforts to take a prominent place in the history of political struggles in Nigeria. He actually goes further to establish the fact that the fire that burned with fervour in the women’s struggles in pre-independent Nigeria, especially in the period 1940s to 1960s, is even greater than what burns now. He is compelled to ask at a stage that in spite of having a greater number of women in public area, “what happened to the vibrancy, and radicalism of Nigerian womanhood?”

The author himself provides the answer to the question in tracing how “colonialism, feudalism, imported religions, patriarchy, and military rule destroyed the spirit of heroism, patriotic radicalism, and progressive vibrancy of Nigerian womanhood in the struggle for women rights, women development, and national advancement.” Tables that show the women that have played historical roles in rights battles support his claims to the radical nature of Nigerian women in the past.

One admission that could be made about the battles that references are made to when women heroism is acknowledged is that some conceptual issues that could have given better understanding to the need for their social or political movements were not well outlined. Even if the contemporary Nigerian woman has not shown that she is made of the same steel material as the older generation, she has a special advantage in being able to isolate conceptual issues, give them special treatment and use them to advance her cause. However, the maximum exploitation of this skill has not been made. Taking maximum benefit of this skill that the new or contemporary Nigerian woman possesses as posited by Nwolise would happen when in their efforts at terminating discriminations against women and violations of their rights, there are oversight institutions in place that are primary focused on women rights.

The premise for his argument on the need for oversight institutions is laid through copious reference to the Nicaraguan experience. Here, Dr. Nwolise explains the concept of oversight institutions, the situation in the South American country before the oversight institutions were established. He also explains how these different institutions have helped in stemming the tide of violence against women and other forms of discrimination. One fact he however establishes is the fact that the mere having of these institutions is not an end in itself. The will of the state to tackle the problems is a major factor.

In Nigeria, oversight institutions do exist. However, “in term of the theme under consideration-gender issues, the country lags behind---“, as the author puts it. The types of oversight institutions that are necessary as catalysts for a more women-friendly Nigeria is listed and their envisaged functions explained.

The concluding part of The Role of Oversight Institutions in Handling Gender Sensitive Issues deals essentially with the various strategies that could be applied to achieving “women advancement, gender equity, women rights and termination of gender violence in Nigeria.” Part of the conclusion is a call on women who have found themselves in the corridors of power to see such positions as opportunity to advance the course of women advancement. He also touches on the issue of self regeneration by women in government as an important factor in the move for women to establish themselves at the corridor of power as important players rather than beneficiaries of some token show of magnanimity by the dominant male political figure.

This call re-echoes the warning by V.I. Lenin’s on the Attitude of the Bourgeois Parties and the Workers’ Party to the Duma Elections when he wrote in December 1906 that “The most important thing is not for us to get seats in the Duma by means of compromises; on the contrary, those seats are important only because and insofar as they can serve to develop the political consciousness of the masses, to raise them to a higher political level, to organise them, not for the sake of philistine happiness, not for the sake of “tranquility”, “order” and “peaceful {bourgeois} bliss”, but for the struggle, the struggle for the emancipation of labour from all exploitation and all oppression.”

If and when these oversight institutions are established, they can not be mere perfunctory measures but the women themselves must work hard at deriving the maximum benefit of such opportunity.

The economic crisis pervading developing democracies the world over has intensified the risk of increasing the feminization of poverty. The standing of women in this regard has greatly impacted their output in participation at both the national and regional levels.

Despite the fact that women comprise 31% of the total official labour force in industrially developed countries and 46.7% worldwide, women’s unpaid labour is still twice that of men. Recently a United Nation Statistics shows that 1.3 billion persons in the world live in poverty and 70% of them are women.

Essentially, the quest for democracy is a demand for empowerment, be it in terms of economic, social or political. Hence the more gender dimensions assets itself on the social-political scene, the better for the overall development of any given state. While the general criticism by gender advocates is that the 1999 Constitution of Nigeria has neglected some salient issues regarding the rights of women, there also exist a debate on the need to make justiciable (enforceable) the rights under Chapter II of the Constitution most of which are socio-economic rights. The fundamental objectives and principle of state policy represents an explicit acknowledgment of the ends of government and the responsibility of the state to the citizens. It is more or less a symbolic ideological significance that government is portrayed as a relationship of rights and duties, a social contract between those who govern and who are governed, and nothing more.

While courts in countries like South Africa, India, Poland, Hungary and East Europe have made social welfare decisions whether by direct enforcement of the substantive social rights or by invoking equality and similar principles, the enforcements of socio-economic rights i.e. health care, minimum subsistence work, a healthy environment, social security etc. are still dry-lettered constitutional aspirations in Nigeria. The neglect of these rights and inability of the courts in Nigeria to enforce this social welfare rights have implication on the aspirations of women in Nigeria.

In South Africa, one of the major issues of debate in 1996 was whether economic and social rights should be included in the bill of rights along with civil political rights as justiciable rights. The groups in support of the inclusion of these rights argued that it would further give the disadvantaged communities tools to protect and advance their interest in courts. A confirmation can be seen in the landmark decision in the Grootboom case where a South African Court ruled that the South African Constitution obliges the state to act positively to provide access to housing, health care, food, water and social security to those in need who are unable to support themselves and their dependents.

Today, despite the provisions of Section 43 of the Constitution, statistics have shown that over 90% of lands and properties are registered in men’s names. There is also no gainsaying the fact that because of the existing customary or religious laws in some places in Nigeria, women have no property rights at all.

Ibrahim Umaru’s intervention through this paper X-rays the phases of Deprivation in Nigeria and its implication on the existence of women. It takes a cursory look at the justiceability question of some of the rights in the constitution; his conclusion highlights key areas and issues that require legislative intervention. It represents a welcome addition
to a growing body of literature critically evaluation the condition of women. Its depth and scholarly rigour is equally enhanced by the author’s status as a male, speaking about women’s issues. His intervention has shown that truly, men can be critical partners in the quest for women rights.

This piece makes exciting reading and it is recommended for all.