By Charles Adegbite
President of National Council of Women Societies (NCWS), Dr. Laraba Shoda is a woman who rose from the grassroots to the national limelight. As a leader of women associations and pressure groups in Nigeria, she looks at the effects of recession on women and children, the challenges of fighting corruption at a time like this and the need for women to act as agents of change, among other critical issues:
Looking at the administration of President Muhammad Buhari, what is your impression about his leadership style and policies?
My own opinion is that he is trying all he can to bring back the country on track. So what has made us to find ourselves in this position is corruption. And the president is trying as much as he can. It is not easy to fight corruption in this country. And it is very difficult to fight corruption when the country is in recession, when people are thinking that Oh! we are hungry and we are hearing about millions and billions of naira and even trillions of naira that have been stolen by a few people. So it displeased the populace. It makes them more unhappy, because they are hearing about cash and they have no cash to spend. So, it makes governance very difficult at this point in time. I think he is doing his best. Nigeria is not an easy country to govern at all.
What challenges would you say women have been facing as a result of the economic policy of this administration?
There are many challenges women are facing; on top of all these challenges is the economic recession and lack of money. You know from the beginning, women are always at the receiving end whenever there is a problem. They are the vulnerable ones when there is crisis; when there is war, when there is trouble, when there is economic recession because they are the ones that will take care of the children, take care of the husband, take care of the home front.
So from the beginning of 2016, until now women have been struggling to make sure they keep body and soul together. They keep their children healthy with food; they trade, they go about, trying their best. Sometimes they don’t receive salaries for several months and they have to manage. So, women are always at the receiving end of any economic crisis especially now that the economic crisis is causing a lot of other vices like rape. They say “ idle hands are the workshop of the devil. So you hear of kidnapping, ritual killings because people want to make money by killing people. All these bad things are happening because people are frustrated. They don’t have the basic amenities. Their children cannot go to school; There is nothing to eat.
But I will say that this recession is not only in Nigeria. It is all over the world. Things are just hard all over the world. I think Nigeria is a little bit better than some other countries. Our problems here are that the rate of corruption is just too high. That is why we are feeling the impact of this recession more than before.
You can imagine when you don’t know where you are going to have breakfast; you don’t know whether you are going to have your lunch and government is saying somebody stole so many billions of naira. You can imagine how you will feel. The pain will be more because of what you are hearing; that one person is stealing money that can feed you for the rest of your life and even feed the whole of your village; one person has stolen that money. If he could just say oh! there is economic recession, what can we do, we are eating three times a day; let us eat once a day or two times a day. Then, we now hear through the television that they have caught somebody with so much money in his house, under his bed. You can imagine the anger, how you will feel.
In view of the recession, what are your expectations this year from both the government and the women?
My expectation is that we will come out of this recession soon. I think I believe we are slowly getting there. We are slowly getting to our Made-In-Nigeria goods’ . The moment women generally decide to change because it is women that can change this situation. We are the agents of change; we are the ones that can change the situation the moment we stop our frivolous buying of expensive clothes, that are imported, and expensive shoes that are imported. You can’t believe that women are buying shoes that are as expensive as N500,000, etc. They go for names, brand names, when Aba is there! Aba shoes are there. I have decided on my own; if you ask anybody in the office, they will tell you I buy made in Aba shoes now. I have been buying those expensive shoes before but I have noticed that it has no meaning; it has no meaning at all. It is just wasteful spending. And the Aba shoes that I have seen these days, they are as good as any other pair of shoes that come from any other place. So I buy them and wear them and I have discovered that the shoes I used to buy for maybe N50,000 before, I now spend about N10,000 on shoes and bags. And if it is slippers alone, N4,000 or N4,500 and I am walking on them and nothing wrong is happening. They are not tearing apart. So, why should I go and spend all that on shoes alone when I can just spend between N10,000 and N15,000 and still get same quality.
I think the recession has thought us a lesson actually. The recession in Nigeria has thought us a lesson on how to spend our money wisely. When there was no economic crisis and the money was available in Nigeria, you just spend the money because the money is there. Oil boom they call it.
What do you have to say on the proposal that 70 per cent of women should be involved in agriculture?
Women are already in agriculture because, even when the men were running after oil, at home, you see women doing little things in their backyard, planting vegetables. When you go to the villages, whom do you see on the farms? Women. The president said the women should be taken care of this time around; should be empowered to do proper agriculture. He didn’t say that women are not in agriculture. He said they should be empowered to increase their worth in agriculture. Women are always in agriculture. Even in this house you are seeing now, I have my farm. I have little vegetables in my courtyard. It’s true because I just want to wake up one day, go to my courtyard and pick some vegetables. It is something that is inherent in women. Something that women do. They love doing it.
Some women have the impression that the Ministry of Women Affairs is not really doing enough in terms of advocacy for women and organising programme for women as expected, what efforts will you say you have been making so far in terms of fighting for women’s rights or encouraging women?
I don’t know whether people read newspapers or not, or I don’t know whether people watch TV or not because if they do, they would have seen a lot of advocacies, a lot of programms carried out so far by NCWS. We have gone to so many places to advocate. The upper chambers of the National Assembly, we have been there. We have been to Consumer Protection. We have gone to the police to talk about the case of rape on IDP camps which is going on etc.
And the IG promised that he will look into it and they will make sure that the culprits are punished. All these are in the newspapers. These things were reported, so people cannot say that one ministry is not doing this or that. The person or persons should join the advocacy train. They too should come out and advocate for women. NCWS is the umbrella body for all women groups in Nigeria. You cannot sit down in one place and be blaming others. Join the train and also make your own impact. That is my take.
What is your relationship with the First lady and how do you relate with the First lady to achieve your goals?
he First lady, Aishat Muhammadu Buhari is the grand patron of National Council for Women Societies. She is to give us advice when we need it; she is to support us where she can. And then we collaborate on activities that are important to women. That is our relationship with the First lady. We collaborate, she supports our activities, we too support her activities. And she supports us when we need support if she can; financially and morally. That is our relationship and the relationship is very cordial, we are always asking her for advice, she comes to our programmes, we go to her programmes as the grand patron of this association. That is it.
As the president of National Council of Women Societies, what will be your advice to young ladies in this country who engage or are being lured into prostitution both locally and at international level, where they work as sex workers?
I believe that it is greed. And in Nigeria we are materialistic too much. People are not patient. Young people want to be rich overnight. When they see people building houses, all they think is that, “I will like to build a house like this”, they no longer want to struggle. In my own days, like this house, only God knows how many years it took us to build. But now the young people of these days, they don’t want to wait. They want to meet up with everybody over night. They want to be very rich, they want to ride cars. Not even one car, but so many cars. I mean they are always in a hurry.
There is nothing like God’s time anymore in Nigeria. In Nigeria it is, “Well, if I am not making it, the best thing for me to go and do is, money ritual; I want to make money or I want to travel outside the country.” You don’t have the qualifications to work outside the country but you want to travel outside the country as a woman: To go and do what? Somebody comes to you and say I can take you to America and you don’t have qualification but are a school certificate holder. And they say “I will get you a job.” And then they take you to a herbalist to swear an oath. What do you think you want to go and do there? I mean people are not stupid, you already know that you are going to do prostitution. Then, when you are caught, you keep giving excuses. What I think needs to be done is that the young ones should be patient. They should go to school and they should be patient. Whatever they want to become in life, they will become with a lot of hard work and patience.
And then, those women that come to take them are very greedy. I don’t even know what I should say about them. We are just talking about corruption; is that not corruption too? Because you lied to young girls, you take them away, you go and use them to work and you get money with their bodies. I mean people should stop that. People should care to think about their tomorrow, what will become of them. This money we are worshipping, we will not take it into our graves. And, at the end of the day, you make the money for other people to spend. So, everybody is guilty.
