Before I begin to explain, I would like to do a quick disclaimer
Femi b loves equality amongst everyone. She is not a hater of any gender!!!! I am not a man hater neither do i burn bras. I do love men and Nigerian men top the list once a while. I just only like to stand for equality ..especially gender equality.
Ok, this fuss started when i had to do some research for class on Compressed Natural gas for cars...boring u might say but believe me thats the way forward in the next 20 years.... Anyway the research was extremely boring that i later found myself reading the Nigerian constitution....(lol wouldn't that be from frying pan to fire?) Well, to my surprise it was an interesting read because by the time I was half way through it..I was mad.
It seems those who wrote the constitution completely forgot women existed in Nigeria. I mean it was so gender specific...obviously gearing towards men, that I wondered what happened to all the female lawyers????
Every line included "his", "he", "him" and I wondered if in Nigeria, there were only 140 million men. Also there was a part in it that said a woman can become a Nigerian citizen if her husband is Nigerian and they completely left out the part of the reverse. Meaning if a Nigerian woman married a man......would she have the same rights? ..as that was completely eliminated from the constitution.
Now people can say oh Femi b..your own too much...you are reading too much meaning into t...ahah even the bible says "man"kind and 'son" of God...does it mean they have neglected women? Well my response to that is 'when you have men writing things, there is usually a bias as to how they tell it i.e using he, him, mankind..etc and it is left for we women to correct and check it. I repeat ...what happened to all the female lawyers that study this constitution, in fact, I would call my sister tomorrow
I even went as far as looking at the United states constitution to find out if it had the same thing since the Federal republic of Nigeria is kinda modeled after the United states system..Well my findings were different..it had "people", "individual", "person" and was never gender specific.
Now my thing is if they say they really want participation from women in government, they should first start my removing all gender specific grammar from the constitution and then we can proceed from there.Below are some excerpts from the Nigerian constitution 1999, and see if i am making too much fuss about the whole thing.
1) Subject to the provisions of section 28 of this Constitution, a person to whom the provisions of this section apply may be registered as a citizen of Nigeria, if the President is satisfied that -
There is also a part that says any woman that is married has reached full age..in other words..if a man marries a 9 year old girl, she has reached "full age" and is liable to vote???? weird isnt it.(a) he is a person of good character;
(b) he has shown a clear intention of his desire to be domiciled in Nigeria; and
(c) he has taken the Oath of Allegiance prescribed in the Seventh Schedule to this Constitution.
(2) the provisions of this section shall apply to-
(a) any woman who is or has been married to a citizen of Nigeria; or
(b) every person of full age and capacity born outside Nigeria any of whose grandparents is a citizen of Nigeria.
(4) For the purposes of subsection (1) of this section.
a ) "full age" means the age of eighteen years and above;
(b) any woman who is married shall be deemed to be of full age.
T I thought this was very interesting and i thought i should share. Am I being too fussy?
extra extracted from
Am I
3 comments:
Yeah I can see why this is problematic, if court matters came down to being decided by that conststution than women can forget about it.
this is largely cultural.
In our culture, a man takes a wife from another village, and brings her to his own village and she becomes a part of it. I think that was why the constitution does not make a provision for a woman who marries a foreigner, she is deemed as part of his country now.
Also, when a girl gets married, she is now thought to be a woman. all the respect that comes with being a woman is accorded to her irrespective of her age. In some cultures, a married woman ties a long wrapper instead of the short ones single women tie.
when u're married in naija, people expect you to start wearing iro and buba instead of jeans.
I'm not saying that these things are right, I'm just trying to get into the cultural context of it. Now things are largely changing, so we can expect change to come if people press for change.
3rdd
why al;l ur posts come dey get trojan, durex,syphillis.....na wah for u o.....u dey horny well well o
Post a Comment