Not too long ago, I had a discussion with some female friends who asserted that it was a woman’s world and that men just live in it. Their argument made sense in a way. These were ladies who have never lacked anything in their lives. They came from what you would call privileged backgrounds. They did not know what it meant for a father to refuse to send a girl-child to school because the family could not afford to pay the fees of all its children, and since a girl would get married and take another man’s name, she could as well make the sacrifice for her male sibling. It was opportunity cost, simple. These friends of mine grew up seeing their fathers pander to every desire of their mothers. They were ferried to school out of Nigeria very early and never experienced the deprivations that girls suffer when they manage to make it to school. They grew up surrounded by drivers, stewards, nannies and bodyguards. In the very unlikely event of a car ever breaking down, the driver broke the sweat or at worst, they called dad, or brother or boyfriend or lately, husband to come and deal with it while they hopped on the next taxi home, even unable to wait for another driver to pick them up. Marriage to a woman like this is nothing more than a contract or business relationship. If it works, so be it, if not, what the heck. There are no eternal sacrifices. The guy would not dare raise his hands against them and they never worry about infidelities or any other kind of misbehaviour. “Let him just try it,” they would say, assuring you that he would pay heavily for it in such a way that he possibly would never recover. So how do you blame these kind of people when they say that the world belongs to them? They live in a world which is oblivious of the travails that poor sisters all over the world suffer. They are insulated from the stories of millions of girl-children who are out of school all over the world. They are unfamiliar with twelve-year-old Malala Yousafzai, who was shot and left for dead by Pakistani extremists for daring to speak up for education. They do not hear of girls, barely out of diapers who are forced into marriage. They do not know about women who have suffered untold consequences from philandering husbands, women who have lost their lives from the physical, emotional and psychological abuses from men. They do not know about diseases that ravage women because of forced marriage or the risks that hundreds of thousands of women are exposed to just because they get pregnant and are about to bring children forth. They do not seek employment from anyone neither are they interested in politics and so they are unaware of the reality of the glass ceiling or the discrimination that limit the aspirations of women. They are just in a world of their own and cannot empathise with women who are not in luck as they are. But in the real world where you and I live, life is much harder for the female gender. Dosomething.com, a United States of America based not-for-profit platform for young people and social change, quoting Amnesty, gives some statistics that we should consider. An article titled “11 Facts about Women around the World” states that one woman dies from pregnancy or childbirth every ninety seconds in the world, with about eighty per cent of these preventable deaths, mostly in developing countries The report also indicates that violence against women increases during pregnancy and that women make up eighty per cent of refugees and displaced people all over the world. This is as a result imply that instruments of genocide such as sexual violence and rape are often directed at women and girls. The report shocks further: women make about fifty per cent of the global population, yet they fill less than twenty per cent of parliamentary seats all over the world. Even more shocking is the fact that women account for seventy per cent of the global population living on less than one dollar a day. So, how then can it be a woman’s world? In Nigeria, things are no easier for the female gender: Fathers confess to raping their children, mothers are subject to domestic violence, widows are raped by boys as young as their grandchildren. Daily, newspapers are filled with sad tales of how women are demeaned, their humanity subdued. So, the question remains: how do we change this narrative? Women need to be empowered through access to quality education. For instance, what is Nigeria doing to make girls knowledgeable family planners, competent mothers, more productive and better paid workers, informed citizens, confident individuals and skilful decision makers? Between sixty and seventy per cent of the forty-six million illiterate adults in Nigeria are believed to be women. And of the 10.5 million children who are said to be out of school in Nigeria, it is believed that not less than sixty per cent are girls. How this would improve in the very near future is totally uncertain especially given that most of the girls who are currently out of school in Nigeria are from the northern part of the country where the Boko Haram insurgency and child marriage make any educational revolution unlikely. Former United States Secretary of States, Hillary Clinton wrote in her preface to “Global Women’s Issues: Women in the World Today” that not giving women, equal opportunities to grow “…offends our basic sense of justice and fairness. But it is unacceptable for another reason too—because it keeps countries from making real progress in creating jobs, sparking economic growth and giving all their people an opportunity to create a better future. No country can advance when half its population is left behind. In short, women around the world sustain families, build communities and knit the social fabric together.” For any country to attain its potentials in today’s world, all hands, whether they belong to men or to women, must be on deck and Nigeria cannot be an exception.

Published in the book “The Danfo driver in all of us” available on Amazon