March 8: What About The International Women’s Day? -By Hussein Adegoke

As you might know and might not, my University project work borders on Sanitation – to establish its interrelatedness with waterborne diseases. A lot of times, I would surf the net to exhibit the needful – getting relevant “online” materials that would inform, wholly or partially, my research work. But, each time I do this, I must always acquaint myself with the same gist – of how women are due for liberation from poverty, diseases, the lack of toilet facilities and a host of other things. At a point, I was poised to think my project work was about them and I, for a researcher, was supposed to showcase their plights.

To put this across foremostly, I do not see a single approach or so, a gender situation to the shortcomings we experience in our habitation. For an instance, in our land, there is financial incapacitation (economic recession, if your nomenclature says) and we all live to savour this plight daily. Lately, Gari (a locally made flakes from cassava) has now risen (in price) to the skies (skyrocketed, if you may say). And this anomaly, as we all know, is not gender-servitude. So, I would ask of why the thinkers and engineers of March 8, the International Women’s Day, came about their concerns. I would ask of why the women of our world need a liberation that the men don’t.

You see, the media and the society (especially those of Europe) have a way of training our disparate minds into accepting their (mis)conceptions. Such, in every regard, is the talk about women’s liberation. It was fine that during the course of probing my current studies, I came across some poignant issues that should be worth delving into. A caption of an article I read, a related literature to my study, goes by “Girls, Sanitation and Disease.” In there was the buttress of the concern of every teenage girl who is deprived of accessibility to toilets and sanitation facilities at the beginning of mensuration. The topic informed the plight of young girls who are exposed to the risks of rape and harsh weather whenever they would have to, due to the lack of a toilet, defecate in the open and at night.

To me, the above make a lot of sense and it is particularly worth clamouring for. As it could in fact be clearly spotted, those are threats exclusive to the girl-child. Or, what boy would have complaints about menstrual discharge, the risks of rape and what have you?! But how should we rate the desperation of a misinformed few at getting its bizarre ideas promulgated, seeking the liberation of a populace not in bondage? How are we supposed to access an hypocritical situation where agitators for a cause recede into their domiciliaries where a comfortable living murders every single sense and purpose of their protest?

On the same March 8, I was awestruck to see friends, sisters and families upload pictures that speak volumes about their solidarities with the unjustified cause of women liberation, on their networking pages. I was emotionally injured to see one of those allies who just got married speak of same. All my efforts to probe how it could be reasonable that one gets married to one’s oppressor and yet protest under his roof proved futile. Or, isn’t this all that this cause amounts to? In every oppression, there must be the oppressor. And men, in regard of women liberation, are the latter.

So, how justifiable would your clamour be that you wined and dined with a husband a night ago, feeling happy about every ongoing in your home and still, you came on your social media page to murder the peace you experience, seeking liberation from the same husband who pampered you? I don’t get it! As explicit as these wailings are and as they could only be made understandable, we should imagine a number of women agitators involved in this needless scandal as some dropouts from the very school of thought that incepted into them the unripe ideas they stand for. Such, like every sectional thought of depravity, would never stand the test of time.

You see, we know what these agitators are up to. We know about how their minds that conceived this notion right from the very outset was trained. As apparent, they must have wanted a world where women are untamed species of bestiality and uplifters of same. Their ideas revolve around a situation where, in our world, women would go around stark naked at wills after they had, perhaps, snatched the natural role of a husband. Such like the promulgators of the idea of women liberation abound among single mothers and the so-called feminists. In every ramifications, these category of people want to unlearn the every conventional societal norm and swing the natural laws of our world the other way so that it might come in their favour. We know what they want! They want everyone of us to be like them; having no home we can call our own, no progeny whatsoever as we jump from one family union to the other like a demented ewe!

Such like them have long revoked the “manhood” licenses to come in-charge in their various homes. They thought the designer of this space, God Himself, knew not what He was doing to have made every living creation in pairs, each composed of the right physiology for its own established role. I mean, going out there alone would tell you something: there is a ravaging hunger in the land, and the “weaker sex” poses to be at more peril. You would notice single mothers on site submitting themselves for any sort of job available —craving diggers and shovels that their hands would barely grip. It is out of sheer pity some of them would be handed some buckets to fetch some water to be needed for concrete mixing; more or less reconnecting them to their lost domestic foothold.

Feminists —ones like the famous Nigeria novelist, Adichie— are quickly riled when the world brackets their gender type with the children and call them “weak”; something seeming to be an apparent fact and yet, they would not concur. The day the several women without husbands today, throng out, summoning the courage to woo the menfolk altogether, is the day I would accept that the feminists of this world mean business. Until then, they are mere talkatives —only socializing and engaging in meaningless prattles.

This article was firstly published by this same Author in 2017.