Before Nigeria drifts like Rwanda
TThe editor welcomes brief letters on topical issues. Write an e-mail to sunday@dailytrust.com or sundaytrust@yahoo.com. he pains of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda was relived sometime in 2018 when it was reported that four mass graves were discovered traced to the genocide in the East African country.
The discoveries raised fresh concerns over how long the sites were known to the locals. Another worrisome issue was that many of those convicted of perpetrating atrocities during the genocide are released, but they have done little to reveal the whereabouts of the missing persons.
The Rwanda 1994 genocide, which is regarded as the greatest tragedy in the country, is a very sad reminder. The incident degenerated to the point that churches, where the Tutsis have gone to seek refuge, were invaded by the militias. The church scenes even constituted the worst massacres. For example 2, 800 murders were recorded in Kibungo; 6, 000 in Cyahinda, and 4, 000 in Kibeho. It was intense that the family links were of no effect.
The mass media contributed to the escalation of the violence. A statement credited to Radio Mille Collines at the end of April reads thus: “By 5 May, the country must be completely cleansed of Tutsis. Even the children were targeted: We will not repeat the mistake of 1959. The children must be killed too”. It is alleged that the media directly influenced the Hutu peasants, with a strong conviction that they were under threat, thereby encouraging them to make the Tutsis smaller by decapitating them.
Furthermore, allegedly there was no balanced reportage of the massacre by the world press as reviewing headlines in the French and English language press in the first weeks did not capture the massacre in its true picture but presented it as a civil war. Such headlines were ‘Rwanda on fire’, Fierce clashes’, ‘Slaughter’, ‘Massacre’, ‘Civil War’, ‘Bloody Horror’, ‘Rwanda Anarchy’, ‘Fall of Kigali Imminent’, among others.
Unfortunately, the genocide spread at an astronomical progression to cover the whole of the country under the control of the government army and the estimation is that by the end of April there were 100,000 persons killed. Amid this, there was no known effort by the media to draw a distinction between assassinations of specifically targeted Hutus and the systematic elimination of the Tutsis.
For instance, it took not less than three weeks before world-leading media houses in their editorials finally compared the genocide in Rwanda with Germany under Nazism and referring to it as genocide. The world ‘genocide’ rarely appeared in the main headlines.
In world history, genocides are heralded by warning signals just like the ‘killer herdsmen’, ‘the bandits’ are ravaging parts of Nigeria leaving in their trail scores of deaths, rape, maiming, etc.
The irony of the whole episode is that the most appropriate quarters pay lip service to it by branding the vicious killers in a lesser robe or painting the situation in a lighter scale.
Between 1991 and 1994, the signals were very strong in Rwanda, and the alarm bells rang intensely. The UN Human Rights Commission even reported some of these signals. Thousands of militia members received arms and military training by the Rwanda Armed Forces (FAR) between 1993 and 1994. The number grew from 5000 to 40,000. This enabled the militias to take on both the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) and internal opposition.
It will be recalled that in 1992 a document allegedly emanating from the FAR headquarters drew the distinction between the principal enemy and their supporters.
Racist ideologies are evil and should not be supported, and ethnocentrism as a variant of tribalism sees members of an ethnic group as superior to others. In Germany Hitler’s grand plan was built on intense European antiSemitism which was carried out by singling out Jews as the source of all Germany’s ills. In Rwanda, the Hutu radicals are inheritors of the colonial lunacy of classifying and grading different ethnic groups in a racial hierarchy.
In Nigeria, it is high time the appropriate quarters confronted the situation lest we drifted to anarchy.
Sometimes, one gets bogged down by so much bad news coming out of our obodo Nigeria that we run the risk of forgetting the good, and this past week had a lot of good. Especially for Naija women. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala became the first African, first woman DirectorGeneral of the WTO. All over Twitter, Temi Giwa Tubosun’s #NOIGoestoWTO trended. Young women and little girls dressed up like NOI- her trademark gele, glasses and single strand necklace to boot - and made videos of themselves sending her messages of support. If there’s one thing we do well as Nigerians, it is to celebrate our own and to celebrate them well. It was a beautiful thing to behold the #AnkaraArmy. If I had the talent for geletying I would certainly have participated. Shebi Temi was giving the winner of the challenge N100 000? Plus who no wan celebrate such a massive achievement? Is it beans to be the Number 1 Boss of the WTO? To be its first woman and first African head in its 73 years of history? This is neither the place nor time to talk about what it says about the marginalization of women and of Africans, so I won’t say pim. Not one word. Not today. Not here. But what I’d say is that the joy it gives me to think of all the young girls that OkonjoIweala’s shattering of glass ceilings will continue to inspire has no part 2. It fills me up like jollof. It is a river overflowing its banks. And so, today is all celebration and jubilation and popping champagne and eating isi ewu. Naija women no dey carry last!
In the same week that NOI was officially selected as the head of the World Trade Organization, three young Nigerian women made it (and deservedly so) to the coveted Times 100 list: Damilola Odufuwa, Odunayo Eweniyi and Feyikemi “FK”
Abudu. Odufuwa and Eweniyi (founders of Feminist Coalition) and Abudu raised over $380,000 in two weeks to help #EndSARS protesters with food and legal aid and so on. In the same week, Ebi Atawodi, former Uber West Africa Manager announced her move to Netflix as Director of Payments, (Europe, the Middle East and Africa) and in Onitsha, my sister, Uche Onwuamaegbu welcomed a new group of bright, young girls to her STEM Academy for six weeks of a free digital literacy and coding programme. It was under Onwuamegbu’s mentorship that five female students from a secondary school in Onitsha won gold at the 2018 Technovation Challenge World Pitch Summit in Silicon Valley, defeating teams from several countries including the USA and China. And then to top off a really glorious week, my big sis., Mildred Okwo announced that her film featuring superstar Rita Dominic, La Femme Anjola, is dropping in March.
So yes, it’s been a brilliant week for Nigerian women. It’s the kind of week that makes one forget that there are many Nigerian girls who are not getting a chance to maximize their potentials. Nigeria has over ten million out-of-school children ( a whooping 45 % of all out-of-school Children in West Africa) and that six million of those ten million are girls. Further more, 43% of Naija girls are married off before the age of 18 and 16% before 15. Nigeria has the 11th highest number of ‘child marriages’ in the world, according to UNICEF. By the way, can we stop euphemizing the union of a grown man and a kid by calling it marriage? Child marriage is not a marriage because children cannot consent . It is statutory rape. Perhaps, if we used terms that did not sanitize the union, many more adult men would be forced to confront the naked truth of it and be shamed away from it. Recently, a guest posted a calendar they got at one such ‘wedding’. The calendar had a picture of the ‘couple.’ The man looked old enough to be the little girl’s grandfather. The girl herself looked scared. I don’t understand what would possess a whole grown man to look at a pre-pubescent girl and see anything else but a kid. While Nigeria’s Child Rights Act of 2003 states that children under the age of 18 cannot get married, a sub-section of the constitution (a clause in Section 29) says that “any woman who is married shall be deemed to be of full age.” How can it be illegal for children under 18 to marry but then marriage confers maturity upon them so it is impossible to prosecute men who marry children? Is that not speaking from both sides of your mouth? Luckily, even among our very young, Nigerian women are fighting to have this changed. In 2019, three teenage girls, Temitayo Asuni, Susan Ubogu and Kudirat Abiola started the NeverYourFault campaign to get the constitution changed.
Young girls like Asuni, Ubogu, Abiola; young women like Odufuwa, Eweniyi and Feyikemi “FK” Abudu; trail blazers like Onwuamegbu and NOI and so many other Naija women and girls, shining the light in big and small ways, some whose names we will never know, fill me with so much pride. More importantly, they also fill me with hope. I am reminded of this line from a poem by the Greek poet, Dinos Christianopoulos : “What didn’t you do to bury me / but you forgot that I was a seed.” Naija women? We thrive. We no dey carry last.
It was under Onwuamegbu’s mentorship that five female students from a secondary school in Onitsha won gold at the 2018 Technovation Challenge World Pitch Summit in Silicon Valley, defeating teams from several countries including the USA and China.