Nigerian Women and Sex Politics

Nigerian Women and Sex Politics

This piece was first published in the SUMMIT Newspaper on August 19, 2010. I’m reproducing it because of its connection to the recent political misfortune of Nigeria’s President Goodluck Jonathan.

Sexual union between married couples is ordained of God, who charged the first man and wife to multiply and replenish the earth. Procreation is made possible through sexual intercourse. But aside from the purpose of reproduction, sexual union is one of the things that keep married couples together. For this reason, the Holy Bible specifically warned Christian married couples not to starve one another of sex, except during fasting (with each other’s consent) which is necessary for their spiritual wellbeing. It instructs them to resume sexual relations after such spiritual exercise so that the devil would not take advantage of a partner’s long abstinence to tempt the other with adultery. The Bible actually says that the body of a woman belongs to her husband and she has no power over it, and vice versa (1 Cor. 7: 4 – 6). I believe that the Koran also instructs or encourages women to submit to their husbands, sexually and otherwise.

I was, therefore, baffled when I read a newspaper report last week that some Nigerian women, under the auspices of the Nigerian chapter of African Women in Diaspora (AWD), threatened to go on sex strike for seven days if President Goodluck Jonathan fails to publicly declare his interest to contest the 2011 presidential election by Friday, August 20, 2010. 

The group issued the threat in a statement signed by its Communications Officer, Mrs. Patricia Oreremi Badejo, after its inaugural meeting in Lagos. The statement quotes the leader of the group, Lady Igoniwari Halliday, as saying that the women were solidly behind Jonathan because of his sensitivity to gender and issues concerning widows and orphans since he became president. The women said bad governance, unemployment, health challenges, poverty, child trafficking and the dehumanisation of teenage boys and girls had for long plagued the continent, and told politicians who wish to garner the support of women to make gender and family issues a priority in their manifestoes.

On President Jonathan’s ambition, they said “We unequivocally support the presidential bid of Dr. Jonathan and call on him to declare his interest to contest the election on or before Friday, August 20, 2010, failing which we will force AWD women to embark on a seven-day sex starvation and will appeal to every well-meaning Nigerian woman all over the world to join us in the journey of sex-starvation. We will call on all wives, girlfriends, sex workers and girls within the age of consent to boycott sex for the specified number of days, starting from Friday, August 20 to August 27, 2010.”

If the truth must be told, this sex strike threat is disgusting as it is ridiculous. It’s an absurdity that women now play politics with sex, arm-twisting men with what rightfully belongs to them in an attempt to make them do their bidding. There are so many issues involved in this sex strike threat that the women are not mindful of, and they are just going to end up getting their fingers burnt. 

To start with, what sense does it make to try to blackmail someone into vying for an elective position, the highest position in the land for that matter? If the man is interested and has a genuine conviction to retain his post as president, why can’t he speak out on his own? Why must he be blackmailed into declaring his interest to run for the presidency? The whole thing smacks of corruption and the usual attempt to play on the intelligence of millions of Nigerians. It also raises the question of whether or not money has exchanged hands to cause those women to make such unwarranted declarations. In view of the fact that the women issued the threat just after their inaugural meeting, one cannot but wonder if the association was hurriedly formed for that singular purpose. In other words, the association did not exist before then, and the very first meeting they had, they came up with such issues that would clearly advance the cause of President Jonathan’s political ambition. Doesn’t anyone smell a rat here? It’s very curious that the first issue the women tackled after the take-off of their organisation was the issue of the Jonathan presidency. 

Now, back to my question on why the president would have to be blackmailed to declare his interest to contest the presidential election. To be a president is a calling, an inner conviction that one must occupy that office in order to help the people out of poverty and deprivation. A man who would be president must be the one to have that conviction which binds him in the spirit as a result of his deep love for the people and genuine concern about their welfare. He mustn’t be someone who is vying for that position because others felt he should, or he is being blackmailed into it. And to my mind, President Jonathan does not have that kind of conviction, because if he did, he would have been driven by it to declare his interest in contesting before now, and not to wait for some women to blackmail him into doing so by using sex of all weapons. It is the lack of this conviction that has caused our leaders over the years to misrule this nation without caring a hoot about the masses. 

What made the women now threatening sex strike think that Jonathan is the best president Nigeria can have come 2011? I personally used to think he was God-sent and actually saw him as the one who would take us to the promised land, considering the circumstances that brought him to power, until he sent that infamous bill to the National Assembly for the approval of about N10billion which was later jacked up to N17billion for Nigeria’s 50th Anniversary celebration. Then, I realised how wrong I was about him. Though his Information Minister, Dora Akunyili tried to shield him from criticisms, saying it was the late President Yar’Adua’s idea to spend that whopping sum and not Jonathan’s, she didn’t quite succeed, because Yar’Adua was not alive when Jonathan proposed the budget to the National Assembly. Or did Umaru Yar’Adua come back from the dead to goad him on?

The Yoruba have an adage that says ‘anyone who accedes to wickedness taught him by another person also has wickedness inherent in him’. He could have jettisoned the idea if he didn’t believe in it, or at least reviewed it to a reasonable budget since the originator was no longer there. Don’t we know of many Yar’Adua’s policies that Jonathan has jettisoned since he became president? He even jettisoned Yar’Adua’s cabinet, so, retaining that wasteful budget only means that he himself believes in it. No genuine leader who has the wellbeing of his people at heart would suggest or approve of such colossal waste of resources, especially in a country where the masses are suffering untold hardship, where electricity supply is comatose, where roads have become death traps due to dilapidation and where unemployment rate is all-time high. 

All those talks about the president being sensitive to gender and issues concerning widows and orphans in the women’s submission are begging the question: what percentage of widows and orphans are they talking about? From what we know, if the women’s claim is true, then such gesture must have benefitted a very insignificant fraction of widows and orphans in Nigeria. And let the women not be under any illusion that those problems they listed as plaguing Africa for long would be addressed by President Jonathan. By the time he is through with acquiring a fleet of presidential jets, the October 1 jamboree and the likes, there will be little or no resources left to tackle bad governance, unemployment, health challenges, poverty, etc. 

As for the nature of the threat itself, using sex strikes to arm-twist the president or men generally is a very wrong approach to getting one’s desires. The two main religions are against it and it has serious social implications. It will promote promiscuity on the part of the men, who may be forced to seek what they are being denied at home elsewhere. The women actually said they would call on girlfriends, sex workers and girls within the age of consent to boycott sex for the specified period, but how wrong they are to think that those girls would co-operate with them. The sex workers in particular will not heed the women’s call because having sex is what they do for a living. No prostitute will turn down a customer just because a handful of privileged women said so. And as for the girls or girlfriends, they will be too glad to have those men all to themselves, more so that the men will go out of their way to reward them handsomely. Some women will be sorry by the time the strike is over because their men would have found better alternatives to them. 

And how do the women know that some of them, even their leaders would not renege on the agreement to boycott sex for the period? There is no way anyone can tell what transpires behind closed doors between a man and his wife. Some women are not to be trusted. They can get home and break the agreement, and pretend to the other women that they are together, thereby leading those they consider foolish into marital problems. A (wise) woman will do anything to save her marriage. When they observe that their spouses are looking elsewhere as a result of the strike, they will do what they must in desperation without letting the other women in on it, leaving the adamant ones to get thrown out of their matrimonial homes. 

How the women came about the sex strike idea is not really clear, but they might have borrowed it from Kenyan women who in May last year, embarked on a week-long sex strike to pressurise the country’s leaders to resolve an ongoing political logjam. Ten NGOs urged women across the nation to boycott sex with their husbands and partners and called for reforms in government as well as action to promote women’s rights. Chairperson of the Women’s Development Organisation, Rukia Subow said the group believed the boycott would persuade men to press the government to make peace, and that the group would pay prostitutes so they would participate in the strike. 

The week-long sex strike did not make any impact in Kenya and that should have discouraged Nigerian women from embarking on such a futile exercise. If the Kenyans succeeded in paying the prostitutes to boycott sex, how many prostitutes can AWD pay in Nigeria? The number of prostitutes in Nigeria is probably higher than the entire population of Kenya. So, the idea of paying prostitutes here cannot work. And how many girls or girlfriends will they pay anyway? 

The idea is absolutely senseless and should be abandoned for better options. Hunger strike would have been a more meaningful alternative but it’s not even worth it for a man who has not distinguished himself as a true leader. The women should rather engage in spiritual exercise of seeking God to intervene in the political situation of this country by giving us God-fearing leaders who will see their role as a call to serve humanity, instead of an opportunity to amass wealth and waste our God-given resources. 

By Nike Oluwole.