Perspective: Africa (June 2016) Perspective: Africa (June 2016) | Page 10

Perspective: Africa - June 2016

People Act which was later updated to reduce the age limit to 21 in 1928. The 1918
Act also allowed women to stand as candidates and be elected as MPs in Parliament,
seeing the first female MP elected in that
year. The suffragette movement also campaigned for other rights such as the right
to initiate divorce, the right to education
and the right to hold any job.

tion to early and forced marriage, divorce,
and ownership of property. UNICEF
reporting in 2015 on child marriage stated
that 23 million girls were married, making
the country home to the greatest number
of child brides in Africa. Customary law
allows girls to be married as young as 12,
but child brides as young as 9 have been
found in some regions of the country.

However, their main focus was the right to
vote believing that this achievement would
give them a say in the laws affecting them.
The continent of Africa continues to make
strides encouraged by the U.N.’s Millennium Development Goals which expired
in 2015. Sub Saharan Africa fell somewhat
short of these goals: being one of the areas
of the world with the biggest gap to close,
it was a difficult target to achieve. But as a
result, we see more high profile influential
women in the media and in communities. However, progress is still slow as the
continent struggles to reconcile progressive
laws with native cultural customs. For this
reason, the Nigerian Senate has received
stern criticism having rejected the Gender
and Equal Opportunity Bill on 16 March,
2016. The bill was intended to eliminate
all forms of discrimination against women,
as well as promoting women’s equality in
marriage, inheritance, and education.

Women are hardly recognised in divorce,
either. For example, in places where Sharia
Law recognises four main types of divorce,
none allows women the freedom to initiate divorce without heavy investigation
into the reasons for wanting a divorce, in
some instances having to pay a marriage
termination fine. This process is made even
more difficult because of other customary
laws allowing only men the right to own
land and preventing a widow from inheriting marital property.

Those opposed to the bill argued that the
rights of everyone are already recognised
in the Constitution. Another reason given
is that the bill is incompatible with Nigerian culture and religious beliefs. Various
religious texts and practices were cited.

Tanya Charles at Sonke Gender Justice
points out that, “In many instances, religious and cultural texts support women’s
rights, but these texts are hardly ever referenced. Instead, people rely on a narrow
reading so that they can use this to justify
the negation of women’s human rights.”
Nigeria, like all other sub-Saharan states,
uses a plural legal system. This system
incorporates native African Customs
with Western-style legal courts. Although
designed to be culturally inclusive they
often trap women’s rights between formal
laws and traditional culture with the latter
seeming to have a greater influence on the
outcome.

Despite ‘everyone’ being recognised in the
Constitution, women’s rights in Nigeria are
found severely wanting. At odds with the
Constitution is its discriminatory customary and religious laws, particularly in rela-

At this point it’s difficult to imagine progress until patriarchal attitudes stop influencing policies and plural legal systems
take a bold step to define what is unacceptable in one definitive law.

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