By Esohe Aghatise

Today as we comemmorate the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, I would like to share a few thoughts with you.

The Equality Model is based on the premise that prostitution is the oldest form of violence against women and girls and cannot be considered a job. This is because the greater majority of those who end up in prostitution (overwhelmingly women and girls) do so due to circumstances that are beyond their control and that leave them no other option: lack of opportunities, poverty, need, sexual violence and grooming, etc. Thus, for us, those in prostitution or prostituted women and girls are not “sex workers” but are prostituted women and girls.

There are 3 main factors that define the Equality Model:

1. It decriminalises prostituted persons. (traditionally, all legal systems punish the seller of sexual services but not the buyer. The Equality Model reverses this and punishes the buyer, not the seller)
2. It provides for the punishment of sex buyers and holds them responsible for their violence.
3. It provides resources for those who want to exit prostitution do so in a dignified manner.

The first country to enact the law, also known as the Nordic Model was Sweden in 1999. They were followed by other countries and there are now 11 countries around the world that punish the purchase of sex, while decriminalsing those who sell.
It would be good if Nigeria becomes the first to bring it into law in Africa.

The Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children (also known as the Palermo Protocol) is a protocol to the United Nations Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime of 2000. It provided the first universally accepted definition of trafficking (Section 3). Most importantly, it requires State Parties to address the demand for sexual services, which fosters sex trafficking.

The Maputo Protocol is the protocol to the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights. It is a comprehensive legal instrument which advances African Women’s Rights. The Protocol guarantees extensive rights to African women and girls and includes progressive provisions on: Harmful traditional practices, eg child marriage and female genital mutilation (FGM) Reproductive health and rights. Roles in political processes. Economic empowerment. Ending violence against women.

It is possible to enforce domestic laws based on the Protocol through strategic litigation. Nigeria, for instance, could be taken to the Human Rights Court for instance for what happened to Jatau. Nigeria did not protect her from the harm she suffered even though she was detained illegally.

Nigeria has signed and ratified the Protocol and indeed, was one of the first countries to do so. Yet, its female populace is still being treated so badly.
https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/human-trafficking/protocol.html

Dr Esohe Aghatise is the Global Executive Director of IROKO CHARITY, which provides support to survivors and victims of sex trafficking and of commercial sexual exploitation. UN Expert on trafficking (appointed in 2000) and member of the OSCE/ODIHR NRM Advisory Committee on trafficking NRMs

On the streets of Ibadan, there is an Aisha Suleiman from Kano State begging for alms. The about-22-year-old lady suffered a sudden divorce and everything around her collapsed. The only option she could thereafter think of was to move down south in search of hope – to do street begging. At a spot along the Ring Road in Ibadan, she sat helpless and confused, her vacant, teary eyes looking into the emptiness of today and the nothingness of tomorrow. “He divorced me for no reason; I guess my time in his house came to an end, that was why…But if my husband wants to take me back and he pays my bride price all over again and plans a wedding, then I will go back,” she told Saturday Tribune last month. Helplessness is her situation; surrender is the sole solution she could think of.

You could call her stupid – or even idiotic. But how is your own situation better than that of the worn-out lady on the street? Your leader warms up to you during every election. You vote him in and he pays you almost immediately with ejection. You cry and shed bitter tears. The next erection makes him search for you again; and you fall into his arms and the beat goes on. So much has happened since 1999 – enough to make you and I lose hope in everything democracy- but, you know, there is really no other choice. We must always go back to our husbands for them to continue to toy with us. Stories that would make the stone-hearted cry in other lands merely collect furtive glances from us. We grumble and shrug and move on to invent excuses for betrayal and failure.

You heard what Vice President Kashim Shettima said in Abuja on Saturday about the poor in the country being angry with government officials and the elite in general: “All of us here belong to a tiny segment of the Nigerian population. And you don’t need a soothsayer to tell you that the poor are angry with us. Go to the slums and mingle with the poor. I am a native of Maiduguri. Anytime a rich man brought a new car to his house, it (the house) used to be a place of pilgrimage. People (used to) go and see not out of anger, but out of admiration. But now, as we cruise around in our bulletproof cars, one will see contempt in the eyes of the poor. We have to improve the quality of governance. And what we have is a tiny window of not more than 10 to 20 years. Let’s improve the quality of governance.”

On poverty and banditry in the North, Shettima said: “They (the poor) are the most neglected segment of our society. You can hardly differentiate between them and their animals. Even the animals they rear belong to those in the city.” Very deep reading of what is happening. It was so nice the words came from the number two man in this government. If they had come from Tribune columnists or from Arise News’ ‘The Morning Show’ people, unappointed defenders of this government would have dubbed us haters of the president and his team.

“But, wait. How did we get here?” my friend asked me after listening to Shettima and watching two other trending video clips; one, an unpretentious street-show of wealth on wheels by the ‘Rich Kids of Abuja.’ The second is of celebratory potentates being worshipped by hungry men and women – because they own this democracy.

“Why did we face the bullets of Sani Abacha at Adamasingba?”

In a flash of recollection, my friend raised her voice. “You remember? Imagine! We could have lost our lives there and no one would remember we ever lived.”

She was right. We almost became casualties of June 12. Some others did.

“What really fueled our audacity that time?” My friend asked again.

“We were dreamers. We thought we were fighting for a future that would be better. That future is now.”

How terribly wrong we were!

My friend now lives in the US. She had so much faith in Nigeria and would insist that nothing would make her jump ship. I took over from her as Nigerian Tribune’s news editor in June 1999. One bad day the previous year (15 April, 1998), the two of us and our immediate boss faced the combined fires of the military and the police at the Lekan Salami Stadium, Adamasingba, Ibadan, venue of an Abacha-for-President rally. The rally held inside the main bowl of the stadium but right outside the stadium was what was called Abacha-Must-Go rally, a counter movement of the masses. The street locked the stadium against the state and its supporters. We were right there; we forgot we were journalists – or rather, we were participant-observers, bullets flying over our heads. People died; it never crossed our minds that we were not bullet-proof, that we could be among the dead or that we could be maimed or arrested and jailed without trial. Then there was the May 1, 1998 epochal climax described by The Journal (15 May, 1998) as the “largest demonstration against military rule since 1994”; and by the BBC (1 May, 1998) as “the biggest anti-government rallies in recent years.” At least seven persons were shot dead that day. We literally walked through those valleys of death. What if we had got shot like the dead and the wounded?

“Our children would not have had any idea what parents we could be. They would have been at the mercy of those who safely watched the war miles away.” And there were many like that. They stayed safe to inherit the land.

“Of course, ‘coward lives long to show brave man’s children where their father was buried.’”

“That is Achebe, right?”

“It is an Igbo proverb. We can check if Achebe invented it but I know he says in ‘Arrow of God’ that ‘we often stand in the compound of a coward to point at the ruins where a brave man used to live.’”

“Very true. We have a saying here that the brave who donates his head for breaking coconuts does not live to get his share.” We did that.

Hundreds did that, fighting the military, fighting for democracy and thinking that after the storms of that era, calm would reign. One of them was a man called Frank Ovie Kokori. He died on the dot of his 80th birthday last week. He was a labour leader who commanded the people’s army against Abacha’s. He brought the military with their tanks to their knees. But he and his comrades were wrong; they won the battle but lost the war. People who fought at the home front that time lost out completely. Kokori led a suicidal strike onslaught against Abacha and spent four years in detention for democracy. Twenty-four years after the birth of that democracy, the man died sad. He ran his career fighting for justice; he ended his career fighting desperately for his life.

Last month, on his hospital bed, Kokori told the world that he was dying and abandoned. He told some journalists: “Please do your best. Flash it. I can come alive again but I just want the world to know that if I survive, I will shame the leaders of this country. Shame to them. How can Kokori be in a third class hospital? I’m dying.” His hospital switched off the AC because there was no electricity and, (ironically) because diesel was too expensive. Kokori, the quintessential oil man of 1994, was, because of cost of diesel, denied use of air conditioner in 2023, a month before his death! It didn’t appear anyone heard Kokori’s last cries. Even the inheritors of the widow which Kokori forced the military to drop turned their deceased ear to what he was saying. And he died, broken. Even in death, how many of his ‘colleagues’ have you read mourning him? May his great soul rest in peace.

But it appears that Kokori’s is not the only death in the air. Businesses are dying; smart ones who have the swiftness of the eagle, are flying out while midwives of disaster wring their hands. Why would multinationals not leave? Sensible people learn survival from creations and entities gifted with the sixth sense. A report speaks of “worms that flee rising groundwater; sharks that flee to deeper water just before a big hurricane arrives; birds that hunker down before a big storm.” Companies are bailing out of Nigeria because they do not just look, they see. They think they owe themselves that duty of care.

“You know P&G?”
“Yes. Procter & Gamble.” ‘Improving Everyday Life; Force for Growth; Force for Good.’ Those words welcome visitors to their website. They make pampers; they make Ariel, they make Oral B toothpaste. They employed hundreds of Nigerians, directly and indirectly. Last week, the company announced its exit from Nigeria. Before P&G, there was Sanofi-Aventis, a French pharmaceutical company; there was GlaxoSmithKline (GSK); there were others. They all held tight to their ears and ran out of Nigeria’s volcanic field. It is both tragic and ghastly.

What do you call a land that kills oaks and their acorns with relish? P&G commenced operations in Nigeria in 1992; GSK came into Nigeria on July 1, 1972. These multinational companies came in when there was no democracy; democracy has chased them out. P&G said Nigeria is a difficult place for businesses to operate – the same reason others gave for their exit. The environment is toxic. They downgraded Nigeria to a dump site for their goods made abroad. Procter & Gamble has one of the biggest factories in Ibadan. I won’t speak about the employees – they are the beard of the burnt cleric. But you should ask what will happen to that vast compound now? It is in an industrial estate but directly opposite the factory is the biggest church in Ibadan. The factory can wither and die, the church won’t. It may, in fact, not mind extending its protective foliage over that site. The prayer industry booms. As P&G was announcing its closure of business in Nigeria, the House on the Rock was holding its crowd-pulling Experience; Winners Chapel its Shiloh, the RCCG its Holy Ghost Congress. We are a praying nation of very hungry people.

What has this democracy done for Nigeria? Everyone outside government asks that question. Journalists of the 1990s did more than journalism and suffered more than what journalists normally suffer. Kunle Ajibade, Niran Malaolu and Chris Anyanwu were arrested, tried and sentenced for the military offence of coup making. Femi Adeoti of Sunday Tribune was in Agodi Prisons for reporting what government found offensive. They were lucky; some others died. Everyone paid so heavily that Nigeria could have a government of the people for the people. They suffered for nothing. On 20 June, 1998, three Nigerian Tribune journalists (Modupe Olubanjo, Adelowo Oladipo and Alaba Igbaroola) tasted the stuff the then strongman of Ibadan politics, Alhaji Lamidi Adedibu, was made of. He was Abacha’s main man in Yorubaland. The journalists were in Adedibu’s house to interview him on the political situation in the country but they asked the ‘wrong’ questions and suffered for it. They were assaulted; their recording gadget was snatched from them and the cassette in it removed. Adedibu advised the journalists to “forget (about) that cassette. I will give you money. How much does your cassette cost? I will give you.” The journalists replied, “No, it is not the money that matters now, but the cassette which is very important in order for people to hear your views as you stated them.” Enforcers got them roughened, then chased them out (see the Nigeria Media Monitor of 6 July, 1998).

There is a man called Ayo Opadokun. He was the Secretary-General and spokesman of NADECO who was seized and jailed by Abacha for talking too much. If you thought it was impossible to live solely on tea and banana for one month, you’ve not listened to Opadokun: “I was the only one they took to a cell, bare floor, no window. There was an opening that mosquitoes flew from to feast on me. I decided not to eat any food. The officers asked (me to tell them) whatever I thought I needed and that they would buy for me. Some of them who appeared to be friendly, I asked them to buy me banana and Lipton tea. That was what I took once a day for 33 days…”, Ayo Opadokun told the Nigerian Tribune some years ago. He is old now. His heroic deeds, just like Kokori’s, no one remembers.

Yam seeds must rot for us to get new yams. That is what our fathers told us – and we believed them. But the Nigerian harvest feeds only the powerful. If you understand Yoruba and pidgin English, pause and listen to Saheed Osupa’s 2009 song: ‘Nigeria Go Better.’ As a child, the Fuji icon heard ‘Nigeria e go better’. Now that he is a father, what he hears is still ‘Nigeria e go better’. “Is it when I become grandfather that Nigeria will be better?” he asks. That album was waxed 14 years ago, ten years into this democracy. Sixty-four years after independence and 24 years of this democracy; it is still ‘Nigeria go better.’ Our banana is progressively rotting; it is not ripening. The hungry are hungrier; the sick are sicker; the greedy greedier, the satanic more satanic and audacious.

“Osupa should be a grandpa now; what sequel to that song will he sing?” My friend asked again. I thought that was a challenge for the gifted musician to take. Then, to my friend I turned:

“You know what we ran into in the name of democracy?”

“What?”

“An ambush.”

By Sonnie Ekwowusi

Ostensibly peeved by the refusal of 35 African, Caribbean, and Pacific countries including Nigeria, to sign the controversial European Union’s LGBT Agreement, the EU-ACP Treaty, or the Samoa Agreement on November 15, 2023, the European Union issued a significant threat dated November 24, 2023.

According to the threat, which was issued in Brussels on November 24, 2023, any African, Caribbean, or Pacific country failing to sign the LGBT Agreement by January 1, 2024, when the Agreement is scheduled to come into force, will face dire consequences. These consequences include the denial of EU funding, development assistance, and program implementation. Furthermore, the threat specifies that such countries will be treated as pariah nations and may be subject to economic sanctions. They would also be barred from participating in EU-Organization of African, Caribbean, and Pacific States (OACPS) meetings and activities.

Recall that before the Samoa Agreement, the EU had been applying increasing pressure on African, Caribbean, and Pacific (ACP) Ministers to persuade ACP heads of governments to sign the contentious LGBT Agreement. Several meetings convened for this purpose ended in deadlock as many ACP countries refused to sign the Agreement. Surprisingly, towards the end of October 2023, news emerged that the EU had scheduled November 15, 2023, for the signing of the Agreement in Samoa, a small island country in the central South Pacific Ocean composed of an archipelago of nine islands, four of which are inhabited.

To the surprise of the EU, on November 15, 2023, 35 ACP countries, including Nigeria, the Republic of Benin, Senegal, Liberia, Botswana, Burundi, Jamaica, Mali, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda, Somalia, Namibia, Grenada, Eritrea, Malawi, Guinea-Bissau, Madagascar, Antigua and Barbuda, The Commonwealth of the Bahamas, The Central African Republic, The Republic of Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Equatorial Guinea, The Kingdom of Eswatini, The Cooperative Republic of Guyana, The Republic of Maldives, Mauritania, The Republic of Nauru, The Republic of Palau, Saint Lucia, The Republic of Kitts and Nevis, The Kingdom of Tonga, The Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, and Tuvalu, refused to sign the LGBT Agreement.

In fact, on that fateful November 15, 2023, Nigeria not only refused to sign the LGBT Agreement but was conspicuously absent in Samoa on the day of the signing. Frustrated by the refusal of these 35 countries to sign the Agreement and fearing that those who signed might withdraw their support, the EU is now issuing the aforementioned threat dated November 24, 2023. This threat stipulates that countries refusing to sign the Samoa LGBT Agreement would face economic sanctions and lose EU funding and development aid.

The refusal of Nigeria and 34 other African, Caribbean, and Pacific (ACP) countries to be bullied into signing the LGBT Agreement is praiseworthy. When the history of Africa is rewritten, this courageous act will be remembered with great admiration. By refusing to succumb to the intimidation and coercion of the EU, the 35 ACP countries have sent a strong message to the EU and the entire world that ACP countries have come of age and will no longer bow to international threats, blackmail, or intimidation. I am pleased that Nigeria has called the bluff of the EU’s intimidation, coercion, and threats—a significant victory for Nigeria in refusing to sign the Agreement.

To begin with, LGBT is outlawed in Nigeria by virtue of the Same-Sex Marriage Prohibition Act of 2014. Therefore, it makes no sense for Nigeria to append her signature to the EU’s LGBT Agreement. If the EU does not want to provide funds or enter into a trade or economic alliance with us simply because we have refused to legalize LGBT, it should go to hell with its funds and trade relationships.

The leaders of ACP countries should reconsider their position. They should stop deluding themselves into believing that Europe and America have their economic interests at heart and are keen on seeing human flourishing and economic prosperity take root in ACP countries. There is no free lunch anywhere. So much fuss about foreign aids and poverty reduction in Africa, yet so much impoverishment of Africans. Africans must understand that the fate of Africa lies in the hands of Africans. Only Africans can truly and really develop Africa, not foreigners. Despite wresting political independence from their erstwhile colonial masters, the economic systems and political policies of most African countries infatuated with foreign aids are still tied to the apron strings of the World Bank and powerful European and multinational organizations.

In his book, “Emerging Africa,” former Central Bank of Nigeria Deputy Governor and presidential aspirant Prof. Kingsley Chiedu Moghalu brilliantly enunciates how foreign aids have underdeveloped Africa and why foreign aids are not the panacea to Africa’s myriad socio-economic and political problems. Prof. Moghalu wonders why African leaders have not woken up to the reality that the so-called billions of dollars doled out to many African countries by their so-called Western development partners “have failed to produce any significant development leaps in Africa, and many aid-dependent African countries are poorer today than they were a half-century ago.” He regrets that foreign aids in Africa have many strings attached to them. “Much of the foreign aids, then, is about giving with the right hand and taking back with the left what is presumed to have been given,” he writes.

The refusal of Nigeria and the other 34 ACP countries to sign the Samoa Agreement will strengthen their national sovereignty. It will erase the wrong impression that the ACP countries are inferior to other European countries. Above all, it will act as a bulwark against the bullying, intimidation, and coercion of ACP countries by the EU. For years, African countries, Nigeria included, have been victims of organized deception, coercion, bullying, blackmail, manipulation, and abuse of power at the United Nations.

For example, under the guise of promoting egregious women’s rights, some United Nations agencies such as the United Nations Population Activities (UNFPA) have overrun Africa with radical, strange ideas that violate the cultural backgrounds and philosophical convictions of the African people. The scramble for Africa, which began in the 1880s and the Berlin Conference of 1884 for the partition of Africa, may have come and gone, but the forms of scramble and partition are still ongoing in Africa today. The enslavement of Africans has not ended either. Open your eyes. The erstwhile colonial masters in Africa have not left; they have merely changed their tactics. Their goal is to pillage the raw materials in Africa and to destroy or reduce the human capital in Africa.

As we mourn the passing of Alfred Henry Kissinger, we can revisit the Kissinger Report of 1974, which explains why America and Europe are underdeveloping Africa. On December 10, 1974, the United States National Security Council promulgated a top-secret document entitled National Security Study Memorandum 200 (NSSM-200), also called The Kissinger Report. It was subtitled “Implications of Worldwide Population Growth For U.S. Security and Overseas Interests.”

This hitherto classified document was declassified in 1989. It laid out a detailed strategy by which the United States would aggressively promote population control in developing nations to regulate (or have better access to) the natural resources of these countries. In order to protect U.S. commercial interests, NSSM-200 cited a number of factors that could interrupt the smooth flow of materials from lesser-developed countries, as it referred to them, to the United States.

These factors included a large population of anti-imperialist youth, who, according to NSSM-200, must be limited by population control. The document identified 13 nations by name that would be primary targets of U.S.-funded population control efforts. The named countries were India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nigeria, Mexico, Indonesia, Brazil, the Philippines, Thailand, Egypt, Turkey, Ethiopia, and Colombia. According to NSSM-200, elements of the implementation of population control programs could include: a) the legalization of abortion; b) financial incentives for countries to increase their abortion, sterilization, and contraception-use rates; c) indoctrination of children; and d) mandatory population control, and coercion in other forms, such as withholding disaster and food aid unless developing countries implement population control programs.

NSSM-200 also specifically declared that the United States was to cover up its population control activities and avoid possible charges of imperialism by recruiting some United Nations agencies, such as the UNFPA, to do its dirty work. Section 30(a) of NSSM-200 states: “Concentration on Key Countries. … Assistance for population moderation should give primary emphasis to the largest and fastest-growing developing countries where there is special U.S. political and strategic interest.

Those countries are: India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nigeria, Mexico, Indonesia, Brazil, the Philippines, Thailand, Egypt, Turkey, Ethiopia, and Colombia. Together, they account for 47 percent of the world’s current population increase.” NSSM-200 also states, “No country has reduced its population growth without resorting to abortion…since abortion is still repugnant to the peoples of Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and parts of Asia and Oceania, we must mask our desire to legalize abortion by pretending to care about the state of women’s health. We do this by saying that we want to eliminate “unsafe abortion.”

Since 1991, the “developed” nations of the world have spent $4.91 billion trying to reduce the population of Nigeria. In 1991, the population controllers spent about $31 million in Nigeria, but this has increased by a factor of more than 30 to more than half a billion dollars a year. This is because Nigeria is becoming too strong and must be kept weak by suppressing its population. Dr. Alan Guttmacher, who did more than anyone else in the history of the world to spread abortion and population control everywhere, said that “If you’re going to curb population, it’s extremely important not to have it done by the dammed Yankees, but by the UN. Because the thing is, then it’s not considered genocide. If the United States goes to the Black man or the yellow man and says slow down your reproduction rate, we’re immediately suspected of having ulterior motives to keep the white man dominant in the world. If you can send in a colorful UN force, you’ve got much better leverage.”

It is evident that the EU’s LGBT agenda in Africa is another form of population control. The paradox lies in the fact that the West, intent on reducing human capital in Africa, is now confronted with a serious demographic disaster. For instance, Europe has transitioned from the peak of its baby boom to the depths of a baby bust. The UK is gradually being populated by Asians, Nigerians, and other immigrants. In fact, it is forecasted that the UK’s population will irreversibly shrink below replacement level by 2030. If the populations of these Western countries are dwindling to their detriment, why advocate for Africa to suffer the same fate?

Therefore, Nigeria and the 34 ACP countries should maintain their resolve not to sign the Agreement. Other ACP countries that signed the Agreement in Samoa on November 15 2023 should retract their respective signatures. The ACP countries should dismiss the EU’s cheap threats and stand firm. Instead of succumbing to EU intimidation, they should assert their sovereignty and break ties with the EU. They are no longer under the tutelage of their former colonial masters.

If the EU decides to cease financial assistance to ACP countries for refusing to sign the LGBT agreement, so be it. What the ACP countries must not do is bow to the EU’s cheap threats and blackmail by signing the LGBT Agreement.

Sonnie Ekwowusi is the Chairman, Human & Constitutional Rights Committee of the African Bar Association