The endangerment of women in society, By Ayisha Osori

What is the general context within which our conversation today is taking place? What are the realities for women in our society today? What are we witnessing across the globe with democracy, representation, ethno- nationalism and clear efforts to roll back the meagre gains for gender equality?

In recognition of being amongst creatives, I would like to start with a short story.

“The room is about three paces long and two wide: a mere broom closet or disused tool room. In the dark room, a young girl sits naked. She looks about ten but actually is nearly eighteen. The door is locked, and nobody will come. The door is always locked, and nobody ever comes, except that sometimes — she no longer has a concept of time or interval — sometimes the door rattles terribly and opens, and a person, or several people, are there. No one comes in, but they peer. Sometimes someone will poke at her, hit her with the end of a long stick.

The food bowl and the water jug are hastily filled, the door is locked, the eyes disappear. The people at the door never say anything, but the child, who has not always lived in the tool room and can remember sunlight, sometimes speaks. ‘I will be good,’ it says. ‘Please let me out. I will be good!’ They never answer.

The people of Nigeria all know she is there. Some of them have come to see her, others are content merely to know she is there. They all know that she has to be there. Some of them understand why, and some do not, but they all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest, the flow of their oil and gas, the mounds of their minerals and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child’s abominable misery.

This is usually explained to children when they are between eight and twelve, whenever they seem capable of understanding; and most of those who come to see the child are young people, though often enough an adult comes, or comes back, to see the child. No matter how well the matter has been explained to them, these young spectators are always shocked and sickened at the sight. They feel disgust, which they had thought themselves superior to. They feel anger, outrage, and impotence, despite all the explanations. They would like to do something for the girl. But there is nothing they can do. If the girl were brought up into the sunlight out of that vile place, if she were cleaned and fed and comforted, that would be a good thing, indeed; but if it were done, in that day and hour, all the prosperity and beauty and delight of Nigeria would wither and be destroyed. Those are the terms. To exchange all the goodness and grace of every life in Nigeria for that single, small improvement – to throw away the happiness of thousands for the chance of happiness of one: that would be to let guilt within the walls indeed.

The terms are strict and absolute; there may not even be a kind word spoken to the child.

Often, the young people go home in tears, or in a tearless rage, when they have seen the child and faced this terrible paradox. They may brood over it for weeks or years. But as time goes on, they begin to realise that even if the girl could be released, she would not get much good of her freedom: a little vague pleasure of warmth and food, but little more. She is too degraded and imbecile to know any real joy. She has been afraid too long ever to be free of fear. Her habits are too uncouth for her to respond to humane treatment. Indeed, after so long, she would probably be wretched without walls about her to protect her, and darkness for her eyes, and her own excrement to sit in.

Their tears at the bitter injustice dry when they begin to perceive the terrible justice of reality and to accept it. They know that they, like the child, are not free. They know compassion. It is the existence of the child, and their knowledge of its existence, that makes possible the nobility of their architecture, the poignancy of their music, the profundity of their science. It is because of the child that they are so gentle with children. They know that if the wretched one were not there snivelling in the dark, the other one, the football player, could not dazzle with world with his skills.

At times, one of the adolescent girls or boys who go see the child does not go home to weep or rage, does not, in fact, go home at all. Sometimes, also a man or a woman much older falls silent for a day or two, then leaves home. These people go out into the street and walk down the street alone. They keep walking, and walk straight out of Nigeria through the beautiful golden gates. They keep walking across the rich farmlands of Nigeria. Each one goes alone, youth or girl, man or woman.

Each alone, they go west or north, south or east towards the mountains, the sea, the desert, the forests. They go on. They leave Nigeria, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back.”

***

What is the general context within which our conversation today is taking place? What are the realities for women in our society today? What are we witnessing across the globe with democracy, representation, ethno- nationalism and clear efforts to roll back the meagre gains for gender equality?

We all know the situation, it explains, to some extent, why we are here today, and I do not want to dwell too much on what the situation is, but it is necessary to state some of the data.

Reports of rape surged from 29 per cent in 2020 to 65 per cent in 2022. Alarmingly, 48.2 per cent of women believe wife-beating is justified under certain conditions

Only 13.4 per cent of Nigerian women have ever used a computer, compared to 21.8 per cent of men, underscoring a persistent digital divide that hampers women’s access to information and opportunities in the digital economy.

Of the Nigerian women aged 15 to 49, 12.5 per cent of were married before the age of 15, and 77.3 per cent of trafficked persons in Nigeria in 2022 were female, highlighting severe violations of women’s rights, and Nigeria, Africa’s largest democracy by population, is the lowest ranked country in Sub-Saharan Africa when it comes to women’s representation in parliament. There is 4.4 per cent in the House of Representatives and 3.6 per cent in the Senate.

Fourteen states currently have no female legislators in their houses of assembly; and some of these states, mostly in the North-West and North-East, have never elected women to the legislature, not during experiments with democracy in 1960, 1979, and not since 1999.

Yet, in what could be a perverse celebration of International Women’s Day, on 6 March, the 109-member Senate suspended Senator Akpoti Uduaghan, one of only four female senators, after she accused the Senate President of sexual harassment.

The accusation and how it is being handled highlights multiple issues: social permissiveness for sexual harassment, the state of Nigeria’s representative democracy, and the example it sets across the region and continent, alongside the realities of women navigating the political space. For instance, in a response reminiscent of the #MeToo campaigns, both men and women are proclaiming loudly that Senator Uduaghan’s accusation, “will make it even more difficult for women’s’ political participation.” How much harder could it be, considering the number of women elected into parliament has decreased in each election cycle since 2007, and no female politician has ever made such an allegation?

In speaking about the danger to women – specifically within the political space – which has implications for women in the social, economic, technological and environmental spheres – since politics is about who gets what, when and how, I will weave in my experience – captured in my book, Love Does Not Win Elections, and take elements from the experiences of others.

In 2014, I decided to contest for a ticket for a seat in the House of Representatives. It was the most valuable education on Nigeria that I have ever received. What I experienced and continue to observe has ramifications for democracy, freedoms, rights and responsibilities, raising questions not only about what kind of citizens we are but what types of humans we are, and what type of society we want to live in.

Here are some of what is important to know about women in politics.

1. The untruths:

a. Globally we are told, advised, admonished that women have to be twice as good to get into the spaces where men get into effortlessly. Senator Uduaghan was reportedly excellent as chairperson of the Senate Committee on Local Content and was arguably removed because she was effective and was not willing to play ball in an institution with a terrible reputation for corruption. The refusal to hear her motions etc. was part of efforts to thwart her – how dare she be brilliant, articulate, or want to even do anything different from the norm?
b. Women only need a level playing field. True, everyone needs a level playing field, but even when the field is level, women have additional hurdles and obstacles to getting and keeping power, which explains why there are so few of us in that space. We also know that the field is not level – not at the party level for primaries, where women are either blackmailed and/or cajoled to step down for men –  questioning our commitment because we got ‘free forms’, and not during elections where the realities of winning elections when INEC/SIECs and RECs and collation officers all can’t be trusted, are slim.

c. We are told as women to ‘play the game’ – but the even when we play the game, the rules are always changing. Senator Uduaghan arguably played the game. She has been contesting for elections and battling hard – playing the ‘game’ the way the men do; spending funds is part of this almighty game, but even now that she finally made it, through battling all sorts of violence, abusive rhetoric…here she is. It is not enough for women to ‘play the game.’

2.  By the time we are voting on election day – battle for decent representation is lost because our party primaries are a sham – the processes are compromised where they happen, even from the selection of delegates all the way to who emerges as party candidate. That is part of the reason why voter turnout is declining – in the same steady way that political representation of women is declining.

The story I read in the beginning is not my story, it is an adaptation from a short story called, “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” by Ursula K Le-Guin. In the excerpts of the story I adapted and modified, women/girls/females are sacrificed for the good of society. From the descriptions of the fictional Nigeria – we live in a land of milk and honey – everything is beautiful, everything works, everything flows the way it should.

It makes it understandable why the sacrifice is to be made. But is Nigeria, the real Nigeria, in any way, a land that works the way it should or could? What then is the sacrifice of women and girls for in our society today? At least one consideration we should have about the endangerment of women in society, the political representation of women and the state of our country, is that we are making the wrong sacrifices.

Ayisha Osori, a lawyer, international development consultant, journalist, politician, and author of the political memoir, Love Does Not Win Elections, is the executive director of Open Society Initiative for West Africa (OSIWA), headquartered in the United Kingdom.

This keynote was the preface to INCLUSION – the second plenary session of the2025 iREPRESENT International Documentary Film Festival – and delivered on 27, March. It was followed by the premiere screening of “Double Minority”, a 60-minute documentary on the status of women in Nigerian polity, produced by ace journalist, social activist and media entrepreneur, Kadaria Ahmed. An all-female panel on the dwindling fortune of female elected politicians succeeded the screening.