If you say Regina Amadi-Njoku is a walking
encyclopedia on gender based issues, feminism, culture and African women
leadership, you may not be far from the truth! The ex-UN bigwig, speaks as if
reading from a book and you are amazed at the wealth of knowledge that hits you
with her every spoken sentence. Yet humbly, she sat with dedicated attention,
no airs, but biro and notepad, as she received coaching from youths on
tech-skills during this covid-19 lockdown.
In this interview with Paul Ukpabio, Regina
Amadi-Njoku who is an ex- UN Assistant Secretary-General/ILO Founder and CEO of
Other Half Empowerment Initiative (OH) recalls her success secrets as a woman
leader in a male-dominated institution and the challenges that came with being
the ILO and Regional Director in charge of 53 African countries. She takes on topical
issues and at the same time revealing a lot about her global outlook and
lifestyle.
In your estimation would you say that the lockdown
triggered off the excessive rape cases that suddenly reared up in Nigeria in
the last couple of months?
The incidences of rape and other forms of Violence Against Women &
Girls (VAW & G) have always been rampant before COVID 19 in almost all
countries, including Nigeria. Actually, VAW & G, including rape and
domestic violence constituted a global pandemic long before the COVID-19
outbreak. However, there has surely been a significant spike in rape and
gender-based violence cases in Nigeria since March which was coincidentally the
beginning of the COVID 19 pandemic lockdown. The high frequency of rapes and
gruesome rape-related murders exacerbated by COVID 19 lockdown has shaken the
entire nation to its core. These heinous acts were quickly denounced with a
nation-wide outrage and swift action taken by Nigerians, especially by women
who took to the streets to demand urgent action on rape and justice for its
victims. This necessitated an urgent response from President Muhammadu Buhari
who declared that 'Violence against women is a national crisis' and reiterated
his government's commitment to fighting gender-based violence. I really
appreciated the governors of Nigeria's 36 states who quickly followed suit by
declaring, for the first time in history a state of emergency on rape. The
serious mobilization of national consciousness, mostly by women organizations
on the horrific nature of rape and rape instigated murders of young women,
girls, and even elderly women fast-tracked the adoption of concrete actions to
fight all forms of VAW & G. Most important among them is the proposal to
establish a registry of sex offenders and rapists for the first time in this
nation’s history. This is a very big step in the right direction as Nigerians
are mobilized and ready to take concerted actions to address rape, which is one
of the most contemptible acts of VAW & G.
Having had the experience of coordinating the first generation of UN
global VAW & G campaigns in 2000 as the Regional Programme Director of
UNFEM (now UN Women) for West Africa, I greatly admire and commend the
Honorable Ministers of Women Affairs and Humanitarian Affairs. Their highly
coordinated and rapid-response advocacy and campaign against VAW & G
yielded unprecedented, prompt and concrete results. Additionally, their
strategic collaboration with women and human rights CSOs, and the clear terms
of engagement and partnership with the federal and state governments, and
community leaders also aided greatly in this endeavor.
What in essence would you adduce to being the cause
for these rampant cases that we now have and how can this be checkmated?
In my estimation, the immediate trigger of the recent spike in rapes
and VAW & G is the COVID-19 pandemic and its restrictive protocol of
lockdown, stay at home, social distancing, restrictive movements and so on, in
an unhealthy situation where the workplace melds with the “family place”, where
fathers, mothers and children all share the same
living/working/schooling/leisure spaces for weeks on end, boredom,
restlessness, and irritability can quickly and surely set in.
Fear, anger,
frustration, and uncertainty about the future can inevitably lead to violence.
A situation where no one knows how the virus is contracted or if it will ever
be cured and where the scepter of death is ever present, even when the protocol
is strictly respected, is a climate and recipe for the unimaginable. In a
situation where food for most people is sourced on a daily basis, each day
becomes a constant reminder of the loss of income and a possible return to
abject post COVID-19 poverty looms large. The harsh reality is that for those
who pre-COVID 19 were already domestic violence victims in their homes, of
which the vast majority of whom are women, children and the elderly, the
COVID-19 lockdown living arrangement with its merged work and home places for
an unlimited time, quickly become an extremely dangerous place, even death
traps.
As a gender equality activist, at what point do you
think religion should be the deciding factor in a home and where exactly is the
place of feminism in marriage?
Religion, like culture, I believe has played an important role in human
society and family formation and management for many years. First, we have to
realize that religion is not necessarily about belonging to some
institutionalized faith groups but it is fundamentally the quality of one’s
relationship with his or her Maker or Creator. It has been proven that belief
in a Higher Being can encourage families to put religion at the center of their
relationships and traditions.
Personally, I believe and know that a family that shares and practices
the same faith and religious beliefs has a better chance of holding together,
developing more cohesive relationships with one another, enjoying more
emotional stability, and supporting one another in difficult times. A great
dividend of having a strong religion and faith in a marriage or family is that
it tends to encourage the children to remain more connected to the family.
On the other hand, I recently co-authored the book: Culture,
Gender and African Women Leadership. It addresses among other issues, African
feminism and its difference from western feminism. Feminism, in general,
refers to any ideology that seeks equality in rights for women, usually through
improving their status, and access to shared power with the men. Simply put,
feminism is about all genders having equal rights and opportunities. A feminist
marriage can be described as a marriage, where both partners recognize that
they have equal human rights, and therefore must respect and treat each other
as equal partners in the marriage enterprise with the man taking the lead.
Because the concept of feminism and the movement that promotes it is primarily
and globally championed by Western women, feminism got a bad reputation in
Africa as it was and is still viewed as the inculcator of Western women
concepts of freedom and liberation in African women. This assumption
undergirded by the western accelerated move to educate the African women,
obscured the real meaning and objective of feminism which was and still is to
ensure that both genders (male and female created equal by God) should have
equal rights and opportunities. In fact, feminism and feministic instruments
for maintaining gender rights and equity existed in Africa, in Nigeria in particular
way back in the 16th Century. And we have examples in
Queen Amina who lived in the 16th century and in early part of
the 20th century, Madam Funmilayo Ransome Kuti.
We are at a crossroads, and we must strengthen the modern justice
system by integrating positive aspects of African traditional gender justice
system in marriages, families and communities. Sierra Leone, Cameroon, Liberia
and Gambia still maintain some women and family courts that are strengthened
with traditional and modern capabilities and skills to adjudicate traditional
gender rights cases in marriages and families in villages.
It’s indeed admirable to see a woman climb to the
top like you have done in the public and private sector of the economy. What
motivated you from childhood to aim for the top? Were you privileged as a
child?
My life is simultaneously forged in City and Village! My childhood was quite colorful
as I was born in Lagos, the Capital of Nigeria, precisely in the Campos
neighborhood famous for its multi-national and multi-cultural dwellers. The
unique place of my birth, my family intergenerational living arrangement; my
formal western education and the combination of my living in the city and
spending long holidays in my parents’ rural communities in Southern Nigeria shaped
my hybrid cultural upbringing and prepared me to easily straddle a dual
cultural lane of traditional and modern lifestyles. Campos and its upscale
environs of Onikan, and Ikoyi was home to European expatriates and many
Nigerian professionals, male and female. Lagos was and still is a real melting
pot of cultures, inhabited by peoples from various cultures: Nigerians,
Brazilians, Sierra Leoneans; Togolese, Ghanaians, Cameroonians, Lebanese,
Chinese, West Indians and Europeans. Lagos was a “mini United Nations”
enclave. Children in my neighborhood benefited from traditional African
collective childrearing from parents of the community. We were taught that
education, community service, excellent social manners, good character,
honesty, and compassion were the hallmarks of a good upbringing.
I grew up seeing different people confidently going about their
businesses, and living out their culture from norms, food, clothes, festivals,
and religions and so on, I saw women being homemakers, and also professionals
such as teachers, nurses, secretaries, accountants, doctors and lawyers. I
never felt that my gender could bar me from achieving my life dream. I
naturally assumed that I was going to be a homemaker and a professional.
At that tender age, what were you curious about?
I was curious about the abundance of amenities in Lagos and the
scarcity of the same amenities in the rural villages we visited during the
holidays, especially since my grandmother made me go to fetch water in the
stream and pick up firewood. I think that the village experiences
subconsciously guided my choice in profession. I just knew that whatever
profession I would choose, it would have to be modeled after the ones exercised
by the women around me in Lagos and the development work my grandmother and her
rural women groups were doing to improve lives in their communities. My career
path may have been influenced by my growing up in the city and the villages,
but my leadership and management qualities were forged through an adjustment to
my mother’s premature death. As the first child of my father who was an only
child, I had to take up leadership and management duties very early in life. I
benefited from inter-generational mentorship and coaching from women and even
men in our extended family. My father was the most important role model of
disciplined, yet nurturing leadership for me and my siblings’ lives. He
believed I could achieve great things and gave me an extraordinary dose of
confidence, pushed me to get the best education and to aspire to the highest
position possible. I am ever grateful for his support and contributions to my
life achievements. He used to discipline us with many sayings and proverbs.
Notable among them are “Survival is seized in the midst of tragedy”,
“Leadership is acquired in the trenches of crisis” and “Management is learnt in
the midst of scarcity.” The wisdom in these sayings I hold dear to my heart and
have tried to pass it on to my children.
As Regional Director for Africa at the
International Labour Organization (ILO) with the grade of UN Assistant
Secretary-General, we understand you were directing ILO programs in the then 53
countries of the Africa continent and at the same time you were ILO’s Special
Rep to the African Union, the Regional Economic Communities, the United Nations
Economic Community for Africa and the African Development Bank, how did you
feel wearing all these hats at the same time and what were your challenges
then?
To comprehend my challenges as the first women Assistant
Director-General of the ILO and Regional Director for Africa, it is important
to describe the uniqueness of the ILO. It was created in 1919, after a
destructive world war, with the aim to pursue a universal and lasting peace
that must be based on social justice. After the UN was created in 1945, the ILO
became its first specialized agency in 1946. Incidentally, the ILO established
its first field office in Nigeria in 1959, before the nation’s independence in
1960. ILO is a unique UN agency with normative and developmental objectives. It
has a tripartite structure of three stakeholders...the governments (regulators
of labour), the workers (suppliers of labour) and the employers (the demanders
of labour). ILO is highly political as it aggressively advocates labour
standards, employment and job creation as effective instruments for economic
and social justices for all peoples.
This is the world I entered in 2000 to take charge of all ILO programs
in the whole continent of Africa. I was prepared to a certain extent for this
daunting job as I had worked at the World Bank and UNIFEM now UN Women. I had
also lectured at universities and had been a civil servant and a diplomat. The
skills acquired through these positions prepared me, to a large extent, to
perform and excel at the job. But they did not prepare me for the kind of the
tough tripartite negotiations required to broker industrial peace between
unions, employers and the governments in a continent of different language
blocs which included Anglophone, Francophone, Arabophone, Lusophone. I had to
learn fast! The great confidence my boss had in me, his coaching, the well of
support from my country’s government and some colleagues, especially the women,
helped me to perform well and achieve the objectives of not only the ILO office
but also those of the tripartite partners. I was one of the few regional
directors recruited from outside the ILO who stayed for a long time, a term of
eight years.
What were those challenges that you faced?
Yes, there were several challenges of which the greatest among them was
leading as a woman in a predominantly male dominant institution while managing
some major events which occurred during my tenure. Firstly, the transition of
the OAU to AU with the primary responsibility of my office to support the
reform of the role of the Labour and Social Affairs Commission in AU. Secondly,
the occurrence of some national conflicts on the continent that required
intensive hands-on attention of the ILO in mitigating their negative impacts on
job creation and labour relations. Thirdly, finding a balance between a
high-level job that demanded constant travel and while balancing family life
was extremely challenging for me and my family. Nevertheless, I immensely
enjoyed the experiences and achievements the job offered me and I remain ever
appreciative of the experiences, expertise and networks acquired through the
job of which I have been sharing with African young professionals and leaders
of today.
As an expert in labour issues globally, has
the average Nigerian worker fared better over the years, compared to global
standards?
I will be very cautious in answering this question as I have been out
of the loop of active labour sector management for a long time. However, from
what I learn from the media, from the Covid-19 reporting and personal
observations, life is becoming increasingly untenable for workers in most
countries, including Nigeria. Most of the gains made in MDGs are fast
evaporating and hopes of effectively implementing SDGs are threatened. Poverty
is on the rise among workers and families. The Nigerian workers’ situation is
exacerbated by the devastating health and economic impacts of Covid-19 which
have made a bad situation worse, in that it has triggered high inflation, a
steep fall in the value of the naira, and high rise in the cost of living, all
in the contextual climate of an existing high unemployment rate and cessation
of non-essential work due to Covid-19 lockdown. The most painful fallout of
this is that any prior discussions on minimum wage becomes impossible now since
the minimum wage must be recalibrated based on the newly increased cost of
living and the depreciating Naira.
Furthermore, the criteria of access to
social protection and security that favors the workers in the formal sector and
excludes those in the informal sector heightens the insecurity for the majority
of the population who operate in the informal sector while fueling some sense
of insecurity. All this creates a conundrum of challenges exacerbated by COVID
19 and its attendant health and economic costs. The challenges are also worse
in the informal sector where income for daily bread is also sourced on daily
basis and the majority of the populations, workers and families are
disproportionately affected by limited access to utilities like water and
light, needed for implementing the Covid-19 protocols for protection from
Covid-19 infections. The availability of sufficient palliatives and access to
them may prove difficult as the determination of beneficiaries will be
challenging especially in cities and even in villages.
So, is there any good or hope for the Nigerian
worker?
Curiously a protective solution adopted to stem the spread of Covid-19
which constituted in total lockdown and mandatory working from home for
non-essential workers may offer a unique opportunity to start addressing the
dichotomy of attention given to workers in the formal and informal sectors. We
can take advantage of how the big companies are re-imagining work, workplace in
the home spaces; and worker rights and conditions, including emoluments and
benefits packages, to start thinking out of the box regarding the employment
reform needed to enhance and harmonize the treatment of all workers in the
formal and informal sectors of the economy.
You have worked in Nigeria, Switzerland, USA, from
your experience which of these countries have the best work culture and
environment. And do you have any experiences you had in this regard that you
want to share?
For every professional, each country offers some advantages and
disadvantages. The most impotent advantage is the peace and support in the
workplace that helps professionals achieve the institutional objectives. The
next advantage is measured by the facilities the city of work offers the
professional and family, like housing proximity to the office and
transportation and security. Of course, a low cost of living is a big plus in a
city of work. The greatest advantage is a city that enhances a professional’s
ability to enjoy quality work, life and family balance. Geneva offered most of
these advantages whereas, Nigeria offered me the work-life and family balance.
Washington was very advantageous in offering phenomenal access to enormous
networks of learning from peers and institutions. Accessing supplementary
education is very easy in the US. As I said each city of work offers different
comparative advantages for the professional or worker.
What inspired you to write your first book and how
many have you written now?
My childhood experiences, being born and having lived amid people from
many cultural backgrounds, watching the gender relations between men and women,
and witnessing the fact that men and women worked in different professions, all
these predisposed me for a career path in human development with a focus on culture,
gender and work. It is then understandable that my writings will focus on
development issues. I have written many chapters in books, published articles
and presented numerous papers in different fora. I could only write my first
published book after retirement.
I recently co-authored a book on Culture
Gender and African women leadership with two other African women that featured
15 prominent African Women Leaders of the ilk of presidential and
vice-presidential candidates. My experiences in leadership and management at a
high level in international institutions and the challenges that I faced in
those positions inspired me to write the book. African women who accede to
high-level positions have difficulty in finding models of leadership playbook
and mentors that can help them lead as women and with African cultural
knowledge of gender relations and leadership.
The goal of my first book is to help African women complement their
modern leadership strategies with lessons and tools distilled from traditional
women leadership roles, experiences, and networks that can empower them not
only to lead more effectively and confidently in the hybrid cultural
environment in Africa but also to promote the emergence of a critical mass of
African women leaders sorely needed to populate the apex governance and private
sector decision making institutions. There is strength in numbers and numbers
garnered with the support of the menfolk will definitely facilitate the route
to gender equality for both men and women! The book provides insights into
understanding how women can leverage lessons of their mother and grandmothers'
wisdom and leadership skills and styles, it distills men's views on gender
equality and sensitizes them on how to gain by sharing power and challenges at
home and so on.
What have you been doing in recent times in terms
of work and how have you been doing generally under Covid-19 lockdown?
At first, like most people, I never thought we will all be locked down
because of a pandemic. Slowly, I became alarmed that I was going to be bored to
death as I was not used to staying home and idle even in these retirement years.
Lo and behold, I became pleasantly surprised that in the midst of potentially
deadly danger posed by the pandemic, I can work and even do more of what I love
which are, writing and praying, since I am at home and with minimal
distractions, no travels and no visits, I have greatly improved my tech skills
with coaching from the younger generation in the family and have invested in
tech tools. I am becoming adept in zoom meetings and webinars. I have even
edited my next book ready for publishing. I am still mentoring young ones
through zoom and having more meaningful and frequent zoom chats and mentoring
sessions with my family members in Nigeria and abroad. The question is what
happens when the pandemic is over to our new found effective home workplaces? Before
then, I intend to enjoy this arrangement to the fullest, praying that we all
survive the pandemic.
Your message for the girl-child in Nigeria
In my view we, the adults, are failing the girl child as well as the
boy child. Both are dangerously exposed to negative development events and
technologies of the 21st century. Of course, the girl child bears, as her
mother, the brunt of most of the negative cultural and technological driven
disadvantages of development.
The only advice I can give a girl child is to create an awareness in
her regarding her precarious state that could even start before her birth
‘femicide’ and provide her with strategies, skills and networks to enable her
to fight off the numerous abuses she will be subjected to before her teenage
years and adulthood. The girl child is a legitimate heiress of her mother, in
all respects, made to accept and cope with her preordained and pre-birth lower
status, the paucity of her rights, and the presumed ownership of her body by
boys and men in her life. The boy too is a real heir of his father, proudly
modeled after him even before birth, with high status, numerous rights and
limitless access to leadership, ownership and power over man, woman and nature.
The stage for suffering abuses related to women inequality is set for a girl
baby and a girl child. The rest moves into action, like a movie. The irony is
that we adults marvel at how and why the girl child should suffer so much
abuse. We conveniently ignore that we wrote the script and we direct the movie
of her abuses.
I have tried to address this and other inequity issues suffered at all
ages through an NGO “Other half Empowerment Initiative” that I founded several
years ago.
If you were not what you are now, what else would
you have loved to be and why?
I would not want to be any other person than who I am now. I am content
with who I am, my family, friends and networks. I have been exceptionally and
abundantly blessed, and have had the wisdom to appreciate my ‘becoming’
throughout my different life cycles. Yes, I have had and surmounted great
difficulties as any other person but those difficulties were the great building
blocks of my character and personality.
Age teaches you to stop aiming
for different alternatives and to settle comfortably to savor who you are and
with what you have in terms of family, friends and assets. It is fun to be at
an age when one can savor each day with all its opportunities and challenges,
knowing that all will pass except the love we share which will forever endure.
No comments:
Post a Comment