Rejigging the Gender Question in Nigeria -By Prosper Ifeanyi

Like architects, we humans are the designers of our own fate and future, but it’s not EVERYTIME the past informs our future. Like the Philosopher, Hegel, once said, “we learn from history that we do not learn from history” this assertion communicates the very fact that: in life, there is the very need for change and emendation. Change in strictures, mores, code of ethics and more importantly, value systems.

Now, to my very contention. I have been made to realise that “shock” is one contraption which will never elude Nigerians. We will keep on getting the “e-shock-you?” Effect. Not because we deem it so, but because we refuse to learn overtime from history and the remote past (which I must admit is worth exhuming). One grave mistake which we have made amongst ourselves is the “animadversion or stereotyping of the gender”. Let me explain using this simple comparative analogies: A BOY goes to see a GIRL at her home in the typical “Nigerian setting”, the girl’s parents might scrutinise or worse, send the boy home with the warning remark, “if I catch you with my daughter!”; or to the girl, “if I see any boy near this house”. That’s one. Next, if it’s a girl going to see a girl in the typical “Nigerian setting”, we hear stuffs like “oh! welcome my daughter” or “she’s inside her room, go and meet her”. Why? Let me tell you why. It’s because the Nigerian stricture and normatives concerning the boy and girl child has been horridly painted such that, the boy child looks more like a fiend or “sexist” meant to derail the girl; he is often synonymously and “wrongly” associated with sex, unwanted pregnancy, destiny-averter etc.

Having established that, let’s for a moment asks ourselves, how did Lesbianism find it’s way to the threshold and mainstream of our soi-disant Nigerian Culture? The answer is simple! We ourselves permitted it. Under our own very noses in attempt to prevent a doom we surmise and guess to be ineluctable and impending, we end up creating a more intricate and worser one. We forget the big picture. We forget a boy child is just and must be recognised as a legitimate member of society and not a time-bomb waiting to detonate. Pleasure is not a tool that only the boy child possesses, girls can give themselves pleasure too! (if not in grander scheme of things). So when we have two girls confined to a room, parents and guardians should try to be animadversive and critical in their thinking too, let’s not stereotype a gender and leave it at what it is. Let’s not forget also that the devil we know or perceive, can be more controlled and dealt with under proper measures; but that which we don’t know will prove hard to control, and will only create a cesspool of iniquities which will end up messing our valued normatives and culture. This convenes a wake-up call and rejigging in the Nigerian mentality and thinking towards the gender. Because, believe me, GENDER INEQUALITY IS HERE and it no longer lurks.