Ekiti 1st Lady, Erelu Bisi Fayemi is a very stylish woman. She dresses so well and it gives her a respectable look.
She was our guest recently on City People TV Instagram Live Chat where she spoke about Covid-19 Pandemic, Rape & Social Violence.
Below are excerpts.
What are your thoughts on COVID 19 pandemic and the lessons learnt over the past three months?
Well, this has rather been interesting and strange times. I was in the United States towards the end of February and I got off the US virtually on the last flight that British Airway had flown out of Atlanta during that period. And when I arrived in London, I was going to see family, to do some personal things but the situation was so bad I could not leave the airport for the two days I was in transit. I had never seen such panic and I was thinking to myself if societies that were supposed to have all these systems in place are panicking like this and they don’t know what to do, what is going to happen to us in Nigeria.
Here in Nigeria on the one hand, it is very sad to see that we have so many cases of COVID 19 and the numbers keep going up. However, we’ve recorded relatively few deaths compared to the numbers that we have so we should be still thankful for that compared to other countries around the world. I think this is a wakeup call for all of us, for our government and for us as citizens.
There are certain things that we have not done that we now need to be forced to do. There are certain investments that need to be made, for example, in our healthcare systems, in our educational systems, in the use of technology in agriculture and food security. And all those things that we have neglected to do are now going to start catching up with us. We need to learn the value of self-reliance and that is one of the things that COVID-19 is doing because every country is looking out for themselves. And the Yoruba will say “oro ti di Kolori Dori emu”. So we need to start looking into how our citizens as a government official, as business people can flourish and we can now start making investments in all these areas.
Another lesson that has become apparent is the fact that we have a healthy attitude towards giving. Many citizens have risen to the challenge, they’ve not been waiting for the government to come to their aid. Ordinary citizens have been out there doing things, assisting with food banks, assisting with providing medical and non-medical supplies for institutions that need it. And we see that even for those who have a lot of resources like the Dangotes and the Otedolas and so on even they know that there is a limit to what they can achieve on their own, so they’ve been pulling their resources to support both the federal government and the state government as well as individuals and I think that is something worthy of note. And we should not allow this culture of giving to just be something about COVID-19. It’s something that should apply for example to the issues I raised earlier on, how there can be a deliberate approach to ensuring that we build sustainable systems in our society.
And of course, on a slightly philosophical note, it has taught us that we need to slow down and be thankful for what we have. Not take life, and living, and one another for granted because you can chase after everything and tomorrow it’s all gone. So we need to be more careful about how we take care of our bodies, how we take care of ourselves and how we take care of one another.
There is another pandemic that is rocking the country right now and that is the issue of rape. Why is it suddenly on the rise and what is the most efficient way of curbing it?
There are a couple of things here. First of all, it is nothing new. For those of us who have been working on issues around rape and gender-based violence for a long time, we know this has been an issue we have been grasping with for so many years and with other influences such as the use of drugs, easy access to pornography, the unemployment of many young people, the loss of values that many people have and a culture of impunity that makes it possible for people to think they can rape at will, engage in these activities at will and nothing will happen at the end of the day. So this issue has been there for a long time.
Now COVID-19 has exacerbated it because where you might have a person living with an abusive partner who during the day might be able to go to work or the partner go to work, there is some respite. Where you have young girls in a household or a community who go to school during the day so they are not available to be approached but during this lockdown period everyone is confined to a particular environment and so it ends up making them more vulnerable to attacks and that’s why we see a spike recently in the most gruesome manner.
I think that it is an uphill task to address this and every single one of us has a role to play in it. Now there are some of us from the Women’s movement, civil society who have been pushing for certain things to be done. For example laws and stiffer penalties for the perpetrators of rape. We already have the violence against person prohibition law in the country and state governments are supposed to domesticate this law. Out of the 36 states of Nigeria, only 13 states have domesticated the V.A.P Act.
We also have the child act law which is meant to protect the girl child or children generally. A handful of states in the country still have not domesticated that. So if you don’t have laws in place to protect women and girls from the abuse it is very difficult to curb a culture of impunity. So last week, the Nigerian Governors Forum at the insistence of the civil society and also a group of first ladies working against gender-based violence which I’m a chair of, the Nigerian Governors Forum received memos from us and agreed to our demands to declare a state of emergency against gender-based violence and for me what that means is that not only the State Governors but all public institutions should now take this issue very seriously and come up with policies and regulations to ensure that perpetrators are brought to book, that justice is done, that survival is protected and we stop condoning a culture of impunity in our society.
One of the things about rape in our society, because you asked what we can do to curb it and so on, is that there are so many stigmas attached to being a victim or a survivor of gender-based violence. What we would like to see is that stigma is moved away from the victims to the perpetrators. The same way there is a stigma around being a murderer and people know what it means to be indicted for murder to come from a family where someone has committed a murder. The same thing should apply to people guilty of rape. Society needs to be able to move that stigma to the rapist so that we can all have a consensus that rape is not something we are going to be condoning in our societies.
What is usually your advice to parents, the girl child and boys on how they can behave appropriately to avoid and prevent the incident of rape?
Before I answer that question, Dr Kay, I want to emphasize that if any woman or girl is raped it is not her fault because we don’t want a situation whereby people would then start saying if you were raped it means you went somewhere you are not supposed to go, be where you are not supposed to be. It can happen to anybody so it’s not the fault of the victim. If there is rape it is the fault of the perpetrators alone.
Now with regards to boys, what I can say is we need to educate the boys. There are some things that are happening these days that are really strange and as older people, we were young once so I’m up for some people going through a phase, I’m up for people wanting to act out at a certain age. That’s absolutely fine. I did not grow up in an environment where it was absolutely unsafe for you as a young woman to move from point A to point B. From the age of ten, my parents will put me on a bus from Lagos to Abeokuta to go to boarding school, Abeokuta Girls Grammar School and back home again for the midterms and holidays, nothing happened to me.
During my University days, a lot of us will take public transport from Lagos all the way to Ife and nothing happened. I’m not saying a lot of these incidents happened then but nothing like now. Now, it’s as if it’s almost a crime to be a young woman in Nigeria. So we need to talk to our boys on what it means to be a man, what masculinity means. Being a man is about being a leader in your community and your household. It means being a provider, it means being a protector. Being a man doesn’t mean being an abuser and being somebody who degrades women and who diminishes them and who takes away their dignity.
Then we also need to see what we can do about reducing the rates at which young people have access to pornography particularly those who are underage. If you are above the age of 18 then you are consenting adult and you can do what you like but we need to reduce the rate at which pornography and drugs have found their way into the hands of our youths. We need a lot of awareness about drugs.
Now for the young women, what I would advise is if you have a boyfriend, don’t go to your boyfriend’s house for a visit. If you want to go on a date, go on a date in public, go to a cinema, go to a restaurant or an eatery but do not visit any young man at home. Unless you’ve got to a point where you know yourselves very well and you can trust him because a lot of rape cases that we see are related to date rape. You see a poor young girl that wants to hang out with a boyfriend that she trusts and she feels like he’s going to do the right thing and be a gentleman and lo and behold there is a rape. And she gets asked ‘what were you too going to look for there?’ That’s not fair because there is nothing wrong trusting someone you think you have a relationship with. So young women, don’t go to the homes of any boyfriends. Go to a public place and when you finish your visit, go to your respective homes.
And now for the parents, particularly parents of minors, I gave an address couple of weeks ago. I said parents now have to have eyes at the back of heads. If your daughter, particular if she’s young but able to talk, and she comes to tell you that Uncle so and so touched me or did something to me. Please, from our experience and from our findings 9 times out of 10, if not 10 out of 10, those children are telling the truth. What we experience is a lot of parents shush the child and say what do you know and they start beating the child. Recently, we solved a case of a woman somewhere in Lagos who beat up her two years old daughter, who was telling her that her mother’s friend or her mother’s husband (stepfather) was abusing her and this woman beat up this two-year-old daughter. Well, thankfully her two children have been taken away from her while she is evaluated to check if she was alright.
We have so many cases of that, the lives of girls who have been ruined because their parents did not listen. There is a whole lot meant to be done but if we can at least start from where we can take responsibilities as parents to protect our children, to advise and guide them and also teach young boys in particular that they do not have any entitlement to the bodies of women without their consent.
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