Women and the corruption list

Until the end of the administration of former President Goodluck Jonathan, women remained romanticised as exclusively belonging to a gender that was incorruptible. It was an era in which when the citizens excoriated the profligacy, brazen theft and a litany of the other excesses of  their leaders, they easily thought of the possibility that women’s intervention in the politics of their nation could stem the raging  tide of corruption.

But this notion of the incorruptibility of women has been unravelled as a myth and exploded by the revelations of their alleged complicity in the perpetration of  the financial misdeeds that  besmeared  the administration of Jonathan. His four women (or five?) have been alleged to be the overbearing chaperons of the corruption upon which the administration was hoisted.

Yet, one intriguing aspect of the revelations of corruption, particularly as regards the botched procurement of military weapons, is that no woman’s name has been mentioned as benefiting from the official sleaze. Some women may latch on to this as a reification of the reality of their incorruptibility despite the excesses of the four women. But women must avoid such haste in so far as their absence from the arms corruption list ironically does not offer much cheer as it is a validation of  their  real place  in the society.

The President Muhammadu Buhari government has alleged that for Jonathan to sustain himself in office, he used the $2.1 billion meant for the procurement of weapons to fight Boko Haram to lobby for support for his re-election in 2015. The money was allegedly  shared among those the Jonathan government considered were the political heavyweights of different parts of the country who could help shore up his re-election fortunes. But since the public discourse over the development began, we have ignored the very important question of  why women  were not among those who shared from the slush funds.

More surprising is that even women have not asked this question. By not asking this question, and by ceding the public space to their male counterparts, women have failed to explore the gains and the pitfalls of the gender bias that excluded them from benefiting from  the allocation of the funds. The women are on the brink of allowing a very important opportunity for the reinvention of their image of incorruptibility to elude them. Why can’t women seize on the opportunity to serenade their virtues? Why can’t they convince the men that since they have failed they, the women, should  be given the opportunity in the next political dispensation to launch the country on to the path of political and economic redemption?

On account of the women failing to interrogate the seamy revelations from the female perspective, they do not realise that their exclusion from sharing the money is another way of political leaders solidifying  an oppressive patriarchal society that makes them victims.  For if those who shared the money realised that the women were as powerful as their male counterparts and that they counted on their support for the election of their principal, they would have given them part of the money. To be sure, we find  indefensible the deployment of the nation’s resources as a private war chest for a  political  campaign.

Again, women in our society have not been known to be unimpeachable exemplars of prudent  management of financial resources.  They have been indicted, like their male counterparts, for wrecking businesses because of their greed.  Yet, the fact that women were ignored in the sharing of the arms funds underscores their exclusion from the political scene. Thus, instead of women gleefully recounting in the public or the privacy of their homes or salons how politicians in the administration of Jonathan unconscionably haemorrhaged the treasury, they should rather lament their exclusion.

In view of the opportunities that are now available to the contemporary women, they should not be content with breaking the glass ceiling in the academic and business sectors. If the men have failed to use political power for the good of the people, women should now step in. After all, women’s campaign for equality has brought them bountiful gains. They can no longer cry as Virginia Woolf in 1929  for a room of their own in order to equal or  surpass the genius of William Shakespeare. Some of these gains are seen in women such as Margaret Thatcher of Britain, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and just recently Tsai Ing-wen of Taiwan becoming the female leaders of their countries. Even in countries where it seemed unimaginable for women to have a political voice such as Saudi Arabia, they  are beginning to break the carapace of female subjugation. Women are now being allowed the right to vote .

But can women sustain these gains? It is obvious some of them can. But the majority of women are still paralysed by a certain fixation on a quest to redo creation and make themselves men. This category of women still see themselves as victims. In their attempt to gain equality with men, they inferiorise the female gender. Instead of consolidating the gains they have recorded in their quest for emancipation they rather fritter them away by fighting for equality. That is why some female academics would insist on not participating in a seminar because the word ‘seminar’ reminds them of male supremacy, as according to them it shares a certain kinship with semen. This is why they must not allow God to be represented by the masculine pronounce of ‘He’ but ‘She.’ And this is why they would do sex organ transplant so that they would no longer be at the mercy of men.

The women in the above category could be said to be intellectual members of the female class fighting for equality with ideas.  But there is another category of women that is fighting for equality with men in a manner that rather brings the female gender into disrepute. These are the women who appear semi-nude in the print media, on  television, on the streets and  public buses. The commonest objection to a reprimand for this semi-nudity is that what stops women from appearing this way when their male counterparts can expose their bodies in the public?

Although most feminists are so quick to dismiss male sympathy, we cannot ignore the fact that what women need now is  the right philosophy of equality that would galvanise them into fighting for the same political space  as their male counterparts. And when they finally get political power, we hope that their names would not be on the next list of corrupt Nigerians. Or such a list may not be possible since the incubus of corruption may have been eternally exorcised from the country.

By Paul Onomuakpokpo from The Guardian