nigeria failing to protect women

[kweku,afro olmec]

On Sat 11/28/09 1:22 PM , alarkam2001@ yahoo.com sent:
RIGHTS: Nigeria Failing To End Discrimination Against Women

Salma Ahmad Kano

KANO Nov 28 (IPS) - Nigeria ratified the Convention on the
Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) in 1985
without reservations. But few of its citizens have ever heard of
the document. Day-to-day life for women in Nigeria is shaped less
by international conventions than it is by the diverse cultures
traditions and religions found in the country.

Hauwa Usman* is a recently-widowed woman from Fanisau village
near the northern Nigerian city of Kano. Slim and dark-skinned
this young womans face carries signs of long exhausting
emotional strain. She says she was born during the Murtala
Muhammed regime making her 33 or 34 - a little older than CEDAW.

Article 16 of CEDAW confirms that men and women have the same
right to choose a spouse and to enter into marriage; it also
says that the marriage of a child has no legal force - instead
requiring that laws specifying a minimum age for marriage be
passed.

About the time Nigeria ratified the convention Usman was
married off to a man 12 years her senior. From the time
10-year-old Hauwa moved into her marital home her husband was a
stern and distant presence believing that his young bride - or
any woman - would not respect him if he so much as smiled at her.

Usman says her deceased husband treated her like a slave; she
was never asked her opinion on domestic matters just given
orders to do this do that.

Usman has given birth to nine children delivering all of them
at home with the aid of her in laws and traditional birth
attendants. Four of the births she says involved complications
that almost cost her her life.

Like a good number of men in Nigeria
the idea of women visiting hospitals because they do not want
their wives to be examined by male doctors believing this is
against their culture and religious beliefs. Whenever she fell
ill it required her husbands friends pleading to be allowed to
go to a clinic.

When her husband died she
freedom. But instead her in-laws and her parents started to
discuss marrying her husbands younger brother whose first wife
she has never been on good terms with.

Usman believes her life would have been a very different story
if she had gone to school instead of being married off so early
to a husband she never loved. But she also believes Hausa culture
frowns on a woman revealing her marital secrets and she lived
under hardship in silence through her marriage that terminated a
year ago.

So where is the protection?

The closely-linked questions of girls education and early
marriage are two of the most prominent issues put forward by
campaigners in support of the implementation of CEDAW in Nigeria.
Twenty-four years after ratification the conventions supporters
are well aware of the obstacles to ending discrimination on these
and other questions.

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height=0 border=0 align=right cellpadding= 5 cellspacing= 3 bgcolor=#eeeedd class=blue_dark_ s2> > Twenty-four years of CEDAW in Nigeria Article 16.1 of the 1979 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women prescribes equally for men and women: (a) The same right to enter into marriage; (b) The same right freely to choose a spouse and to enter into marriage only with their free and full consent; betrothal and the marriage of a child shall have no legal effect and all necessary action including legislation shall be taken to specify a minimum age for marriage. Article XXI of the 1990 African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child to which Nigeria is also a signatory states: Child marriage and the betrothal of girls and boys shall be prohibited and effective action including legislation shall be taken to specify the minimum age of marriage to be eighteen years.

(Even) if CEDAW is
accepted and implemented at the federal level in Nigeria it will
certainly face opposition in the states due to some provisions
(which challenge) religious and cultural values. But the focus
should be on how to deal with such opposition says Fatima Kwaku.

Kwaku was
from 2001 to 2004 and has remained involved in holding
government accountable. Herself a Muslim and a barrister she
knew the
marriage.

She stresses that CEDAW must be advocated with great care so
that people get the correct message and the intended changes in
womens status are acceptable amongst the people at the
grassroots levels. This she said calls for the document and new
laws passed to implement to be framed in such a way as to avoid
unnecessary hostility from religious or other cultural forces
without sacrificing their empowering content.

Aminu Ibrahim also lawyer has a more positive view of what
CEDAW has accomplished in Nigeria.

Women have become fully active in Nigerian politics which was
not the case before he offers as one example. And there are
so many non-governmental organisations advocating to women about
family planning.

He remarked that while the Convention might be well-suited to
fighting discrimination against women on the global scale its
implementation was destined to be awkward in local situations
such as in Kano where he says the Hausa community - including
what he terms its naturally reserved women - view with
suspicion.

Imagine Hausa women discussing about reproductive health or
family planning issues when they are being oriented by NGOs.
woman hardly discusses her reproductive health with even her
husband.

Realism or resignation?

Ibrahim and Kwaku both seem to accept that many types of
discrimination are too deeply entrenched to be tackled directly
in the near future.

The only option is to put those sections regarded as
controversial on hold for the time being and implement the
remaining non-controversial sections. Half a loaf of bread is
better than none and with time things will change. Kwaku says.

For CEDAW to take root in Nigeria state and federal
governments must show political will and commitment through
allocating financial and human resources across sectors. CEDAW
must also be seen as a social responsibility for all rather than
the governments alone.

There must be full awareness creation to ensure acceptance and
full utilisation of the convention at all levels. It is a
critical challenge as far as the domestication process is
concerned she says stressing that it worries her that 24 years
after ratification CEDAW still seems as foreign as the country
in which governments met to draft it.

By now the word CEDAW should have been common even to the
housewives in Nigeria if it was regarded seriously by the
governments said Kwaku. It must be integrated into school
curriculum so that the young will have the concept of
non-discrimination imbibed into them said Kwaku.

No country has achieved 100 percent compliance she says.
we the Nigerian women will remain optimistic about the success
and full implementation of CEDAW in the near future.

Perhaps not soon enough for Hauwa Usman whose childhood ended
abruptly just as the Convention that should have guaranteed a
ten-year-old girl time and space to grow was adopted.


 (FIN/2009)