A workshop can be defined as a building which is fitted with tools and machinery for servicing/repairing or making things. Workshops come in different forms, depending on what services you want to render. But this is like starting a story from the end.
Before the coming of Prof. Chukwuma Soludo, an appointee of Olusegun Obasanjo, as the governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, there were commercial, merchant and micro finance banks “pacha pacha” everywhere. In fact, there were more banks in the country than Pentecostal churches. And what is “pacha pacha”? It is a borrowed word. So, don’t bother to look up in your dictionary. It means aplenty in Hausa.
Soludo’s solution to the mushrooming of banks in the country was to force the financial institutions to consolidate because individually, most of them are either weak or going bankrupt. Soludo had to set a minimum standard… raise N25bn or go under. That order eventually separated the men from the boys. A few of them like the Guaranty Trust Bank, Diamond Bank, United Bank for Africa (the wise men/women’s bank) and the numero uno, the First Bank, stood firm like the Rock of Gibraltar. How could I have forgotten the massive Zenith Bank? Many banks had to coalesce to save their arse… while several others went into oblivion.
During the “pacha pacha era”, bank premises were swarmed with all manner of marketers. The banking sector was the most preferred destination for anyone in skirt. Graduates of Biology, Zoology, Ornithology, Theology, Musicology, Oceanography and other irrelevant disciplines held sway in the marketing departments. They are the female predators unleashed on potential customers. In the eye of the world, they are better known as corporate prostitutes. I know of one of the aforementioned banks that has specifications for potential marketers: fair skin. Fair complexioned ladies (not to be confused with albinos) are centres of attraction anywhere. These corporate whores are let loose on ogas at the top in the MDAs, at all levels of government in a desperate bid to out-bank themselves. It is this vulnerability of these ogas that leads to the ridiculous opening of numerous accounts in various banks. Most of them junket around the globe with these marketers turned mistresses. In many cases, when they are tired of servicing their physical motors in a particular workshop, they sack their old sexchanics and recruit new ones.
The reference made to sexchanics brings us to the title of this piece. Most women, young and old, are under the primodial conviction that the Creator, in crafting them, has equipped them with in-built workshops which they could use for self-employment. Very few women can resist the temptation to operate their workshops in the face of grinding poverty, hardship fuelled by joblessness and the desire to live big among the sexchanical engineers is: why voyaging all the way to Sokoto to look for what is already in the pocket of your shokoto? Excuse the typical Yoruba diction.
Sexchanical engineering is practised in different ways. There are professional sexchanics. Those ones operate in brothels. We have quasi-professionals who ply their trade on and off campus of our higher institutions. They up their operations especially when ASUU strikes send them packing from lecture halls as we witness from time to time in this part of the divide. Then, there are the working class pseudo-professional sexchanics who hook up to the ogas at the top as mistresses or for job security. The competition is stiff out there. So, they strive hard to excite and happify their patrons by surfing through the numerous porno websites to acquire the latest sexchanical engineering skills.
But one woman has been making concerned efforts to change the mentality of these sexchanics across the land. She is Mrs. Sandra Aguebo Ekperuo. Way back in 2001, Mrs. Ekperuo launched a bold project she code named Lady Mechanic Initiative or LAMI. As recently as September 2011, about 10 years after the birth of LAMI, PAN Nigeria Limited graduated the 6th set of female mechanics groomed at the company’s training centre in Kaduna.
For two years now, LAMI, an accredited Non-Governmental Organisation, has been getting sponsorship from the Nigerian Bottling Company (NBC). Only recently, Mrs. Ekperuo featured on the front pages of this paper and delighted me with the giant strides she has made with her pet project. She spoke enthusiastically about hundreds of ladies that have benefitted from the initiative over the years. But the voyage is a long way off. So far, LAMI is actively present only in three states, namely Lagos, Benin and Kaduna. Thirty-three other states are beckoning. The Federal Capital Territory, Abuja, is the latest territory also captured by LAMI and the initiative has been introduced to the Federal Ministry of Women Affairs. Mrs Ekperuo is excited that lady mechanics are not jobless. Their incursion into a territory hitherto ruled by men should make patronage of lady mechanics an exciting experience. Besides, women are known to be more meticulous and honest. They are most unlikely to fiddle with the parts of your car like most crooked male mechanics are wont to do.
As stated by the initiator of LAMI, the project would guarantee sustainable development for the country. In her words, “You can never find a lady mechanic with a certificate roaming the streets because if she cannot get a job with a car company, she will set up her own and start training others.”
The Federal Ministry of Women Affairs should promptly buy into this amazing idea aimed at empowering the teeming ladies out there. It should also get its counterparts at the state levels to key into the scheme. The SURE-P initiative needs to look in the direction of LAMI to see where it can collaborate with it especially as regards acquisition of state of the art tools to repair and service modern automobiles. There can be no better initiative than LAMI which is targeted at our young ladies who are prone to negative tendencies such as prostitution and the like. It should be a thing of extreme joy that our young girls are being trained to make money by lying under automobiles as mechanics and not under men as (commercial) sex workers.
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