by Ayisha Osori

Politics was and still remains a very male-dominated world where being female is considered an extreme handicap, and what better way to deal with this handicap than to put as much distance as possible between herself and what it means in society to be female?

It is fitting that the week Baroness Margaret Thatcher died, mercilessly pilloried by millions for many things including “doing nothing for feminism”, a champion of policies to empower women, Mallam Sanusi Lamido, scorched Nigerian women in government using the increasingly threadbare fallacy that “women are their own worst enemies”. The relationship between women is set in the context of patriarchy, and to fixate only on the dynamics between women without looking at the entire system is wrong.

I spent my second week as an Eisenhower Fellow in Washington, DC, meeting with 14 different organisations around my focus areas: enhancing the political participation of women (including creating a more enabling environment for good governance) and managing gender-based violence. The former is low with numbers sliding in the National Assembly while reports of the latter are increasing, and because of the link between women feeling safe and being confident enough to participate in politics, the Nigerian Women’s Trust Fund is focused on addressing both.

Some of the common threads from the discussions with private and public organisations such as Emily’s List and the Department of Justice is that (1) the full participation of women in society is necessary for sustained development and (2) mindsets and culture sometimes limit our potential and narrow the frames through which we perceive and analyse and are notoriously hard to change.

The United States ranks 77 out of 139 countries in the representation of women in parliament (17 per cent and 20 per cent in the Congress and Senate respectively) but what they have found is that their major problem, within a similar patriarchal culture, is that the women do not run. The women do not run for a variety of reasons including that they are not asked; the narrative about their place in society rarely includes political participation, and, until recently, there weren’t enough role models.

And this is the unintended role that Thatcher played. She was a symbol of possibilities for millions who never dreamt that a woman could be prime minister of Britain. Undoubtedly, she was driven by something inside her that many of us, women and men, will never know but for those who know her story from grocers’ daughter to 10 Downing Street, the greatest challenge she had to overcome in getting there – and staying there for 11 years — was being female. Politics was and still remains a very male-dominated world where being female is considered an extreme handicap, and what better way to deal with this handicap than to put as much distance as possible between herself and what it means in society to be female? In her context she must have felt that the only way to succeed was to behave like a man, especially when there were no females to model after. Acknowledging that as far back as 1979 she gave and continues to give young girls and women all over the world a sense of “She is me, I can do it too” does not equate to whitewashing her most heinous policies and utterances. However, even then we must ask, if Thatcher had been prime minister in a country like Rwanda today where 50 per cent of her fellow MPs were women…would the context and her policies have been different?

It is the lack of the strength of numbers, the culture of denigrating women and girls, it is the dearth of any will to educate and empower women that makes it hard(er) for the few women in government to do much to advance the cause of women. And this is where the fallacy of women being their own worst enemies unravels. If women and men have grown up in a culture with strong narratives which promote the understanding that women are emotionally and mentally weak, devious and promiscuous (everything from Tales by Moonlight to Cinderella and the Proverbial Oppression of Women in Yoruba African Culture to Tastuniyoyin Hausawa), then, why is it a surprise when women (and men) want to dissociate themselves from women?

In Nigeria, the percentage of women in the House and Senate is 6.7 per cent and 6.4 per cent respectively, and so we’ve earned the rank of 125 — marginally better than Sri Lanka and Haiti. If the majority of politicians and policymakers are men and our laws and policies are not designed to promote and empower women, how can women be blamed? Mallam Sanusi was right when he highlighted the dangers of extremely low literacy in the north amongst females (and males) and linked it to the economy and security. He is also right to say, “If you are a female minister…and after four years you cannot say what you did for women, shame on you.” But his charge for women to “hold their counterparts to account” is bad advice and puts him squarely with the feminists who blame women and not the system for the shortcomings of government policies to cater for women. If there are seven male ministers for every three female ministers, are the three ministers there to serve just Nigerian women or all Nigerians? And if state assemblies have no female legislators, as is the case in many northern states, does that mean the women cannot hold the men in those states accountable even though they voted for them?

We cannot hold women to higher public standards than men when the context does not support it – we should hold all public officials accountable for their responsibilities. We cannot expect the token women in elected or appointed positions to be able to make a difference in a male-dominated world, especially when the democracy we practise is based on patronage and not on promises or delivery. And until we acknowledge that some of our narratives are detrimental, women and girls will continue to be shut out and the few who make it will continue to think that acting like men is the only way to succeed…which tells us that, really, the system of patriarchy is everyone’s worst enemy – the women, the men, the young and the old.

————————-

Read this piece in Leadership

 

Op-ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija.