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A few weeks ago, I received a message that an old friend and mentor of mine would be in Nigeria on an official visit and had requested that I meet with her during her stay in Nigeria and take part in some events with her. When I saw the dates she wanted us to meet in Abuja, I winced. I try not to travel these days, unless I really have to. I have not allowed myself to be carried away by the many people who have told me I must have COVID-19 antibodies. I don’t blame them for thinking that way because there was a time when COVID blazed through the Ekiti Government House and official circles, taking down many people, including our big Oga who I sleep on the same bed with! People went on so much about me having antibodies that I took an antibody test when I was in the US in December and it came back negative, so no antibodies for me.
As I stared at the email message inviting me to meet with my old friend in Abuja, I thought back to July 1996. I was in Kampala, Uganda, where I had gone to set up a flagship project for Akina Mama wa Afrika, the African women’s development organisation I was working for in London. We were setting up an African Women’s Leadership Institute for young women aged 25 to 40. It was just one year after the 1995 Beijing Conference for women, and even though we had been planning the programme before Beijing, it was now time to put the plans into action. I had done what was to turn out to be the easy part, I had made the case for the project and I had raised the money to open an Africa office, hire staff and run a pan-African training institute.
Now came the hard part of building and sustaining relationships with a range of women in the feminist movement around the African continent and within Uganda itself. These women would be the ones to lend their goodwill to this new project run by a group of young women, nominate candidates, provide content for the training programmes, co-host off-site events, and serve as faculty members. I had been given the name of an awesome woman in her late 30s at the time who had trained as an aeronautical engineer, the first woman in her country to do so. She went to work as a flight engineer for Ugandan Airlines and quit her job to join the Ugandan war of liberation (also known as the Bush War) from 1981 to 1986. She was a combatant in the National Liberation Army, alongside their leader, current President Yoweri Museveni. That was when he was a true revolutionary with a clear vision, and not the dictator he has morphed into.
After the liberation war was won, she went to serve as Uganda‘s Ambassador to France for a number of years. When I first met her in July 1996, she had been back in Uganda for two years and was a member of the Constituent Assembly. She was a formidable politician, keen on building networks and creating opportunities for other women in politics. When I walked into her office that day, save for her height, there is nothing about her demeanour that would alert you to the unbelievable things this woman has accomplished. From the first day we met, we clicked and she became my big sister. She dutifully attended every event we invited her to over the years for the African Women’s Leadership Institute (AWLI) and other programmes for the movement around the continent. In May 2005, when she was head of the Gender Directorate at the African Union, I was invited to Dakar, Senegal, for an Africa-wide AU meeting on Gender Mainstreaming. I was on the Committee for Women and Development at the AU at the time, and the plan was to have a meeting of the committee, plus the official inter-ministerial meeting and a couple of side events. The five days I spent in Dakar turned out to be chaotic and terribly stressful. The AU had made their own arrangements for a smooth meeting, but for inexplicable reasons the host country and the local organisers were not cooperating. The rooms for the various meetings kept changing, we kept getting lost trying to find our meeting rooms in the bowels of the vast conference centre, there was always a problem with translation/translators and at some point the local secretariat mysteriously ran out of paper and ink to print the conference documents. It was a logistical nightmare and I was worried that my friend might be blamed for whatever was going wrong, even though it was not her fault. I watched her move around sorting things out and with determination, perseverance and diplomacy, the meetings got done. She has always been such a class act.
Our paths have crossed many times over the years. When she left the African Union, she joined the United Nations for a while, then left to serve as the CEO of Oxfam International. The organisation she founded (FOWODE) just after she started engaging as a frontline politician in Uganda has been a long-standing grantee partner of the African Women’s Development Fund, the grantmaking foundation for African women I co-founded with two other African women 20 years ago, and which still continues to support thousands of women’s rights organisations around the continent with grants.
As I typed a ‘Yes’ to the March 8 invitation, it dawned on the that it was exactly 25 years ago that we met for the first time, and so much has changed in the African women’s movement, yet many things remain the same. In August 2019, this big sister and friend of mine, Winnie Byanyima, was appointed executive director of UNAIDS. When I heard the news, I was overjoyed. At long last, an African woman at the helm of a vital UN agency that has such a critical impact on the lives of African women.
Every year, governments and citizens of the world gather to mark March 8th, which has been set aside to celebrate and identify with women of the world. It is a time for reflection on how far we have come in raising the status of women, fighting for an end to all forms of gender discrimination and ensuring that women play full and equal roles at all levels of society. In spite of the many efforts at ensuring that women are empowered and that they have equality of opportunity, Nigerian women still live in dire poverty, they suffer many forms of discrimination, unprecedented levels of sexual and gender-based violence, they are collateral damage when there is insecurity, they are mostly excluded from key decision-making positions, they lack access to water, shelter and adequate nutrition and they struggle to access qualitative healthcare services.
The theme for IWD 2021 is Women in Leadership: Achieving an equal future in a COVID-19 world. I have been thinking about what this means for women like Winnie and me and others like us, who have travelled this road together for so long to change the narrative. Working for key institutions, raising money for programmes, advocating laws, influencing policy, fighting personal and institutional discrimination, building the capacity of women, it is a long list.
•Bisi Adeleye-Fayemi is a gender specialist, social entrepreneur and writer. She is the founder of Abovewhispers.com, an online
community for women. She is the First Lady of Ekiti State and can be reached at [email protected]
