Date: 2016-10-16

The President’s wife has committed a sacrilege. She has violated a ground rule and the unwritten code which demanded that she can only be seen but not heard. Every husband makes the rule that governs his house, and President Buhari has never let anyone in doubt as to the rule that subsist in his house. Right from the campaign season and while she was traversing the length and breadth of Nigeria to campaign for him, then candidate Buhari had said categorically that there won’t be any office of First Lady when he emerges President. To all intent and purpose, the President was saying that Mrs. Aisha won’t have any feasible official position but remains the wife of the President who, like any other responsible wife, would continue to cook his meals and make his bed. Mrs. Aisha Buhari was not uncomfortable with this arrangement. If anything, she was proud of it.

About a year ago, while hosting a group of children from the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) to a party to celebrate the Eid-El-Fitri festival, Mrs. Aisha excused herself to go cook for her husband. At that time, Mrs. Buhari had gleefully told the audience that despite her status as mother of the nation, she still prepares her husband’s meal personally. And since you don’t “prepare” food in the sky but in the kitchen, which wife doesn’t belong in her husband’s kitchen somehow? In fact, belonging in the kitchen is first and foremost the official responsibility of every responsible wife.

I may not have known the name it is called, but I have been advocating for women’s rights since my days as an undergraduate at the University of Ilorin. Those who know the esteemed position I placed women were therefore not surprised when I chose to write my undergraduate thesis on the subject of GENDER POLITICS AND THE LEVEL OF WOMEN POLITICAL PARTICIPATION IN NIGERIA.  I have been and continue to be a strong advocate for the right of women to contribute to national discourse and partake in the onerous task of shaping the destiny of a society in which they are a key stakeholder. As mothers of leaders, men and women, I believe women are the foundation of the entire social and moral structures that combine to shape the totality of the character of rulers. The more bad women a society has, the more bad citizens and ultimately rulers such a society will get. The role of women in nation building cannot be relegated or diminished.

However, before going out to play the role of a society builder,  a good woman is first and foremost a good mother and a wife. Therefore, we must be careful not to over sensationalized an issue that is somehow already settled between the two concerned. The assertion by the President that his wife belongs in his kitchen is something Mrs. Aisha herself was comfortable with. She loves the fact that she is able to still enter the kitchen and cook for her husband, despite her new position as the First Lady, and so she wears the ‘kitchen wife' tag like a badge of pride until the ‘gender activists’ stepped in. Now, the activists are drinking paracetamol to cure another man's headache. And even though recession and hunger and unemployment continue to pummel our country left, right and center; the catchword we spent days trending on social media is #TheOtherRoom.

I have listened to the audio clip of the BBC interview that gave rise to the latest debate on how President Buhari perceives women and the general status of women in our society. For one, the interview is only a climax of the frustration and anguish of a woman whose husband is not according her words the respect she thinks they deserve. Mrs. Buhari’s words, “He can see. Among all the people he selected, if he is asked among 50 people, he doesn’t know 45. I don’t know them despite staying with him for 27 years” is a classic pointer to the fact that the wife of the President must have complained about his choice of appointees.

However, beyond being her husband, the only thing that possibly makes them equal, President Buhari is far older than the First Lady. He also believes that he has more experience in issues of governance than his wife. This sentiment  was very well reflected in President Buhari’s now viral response to his wife's BBC interview.

When he sais, “So I claim superior knowledge over her and the rest of the opposition, because in the end, I have succeeded. It is not easy to satisfy the whole Nigerian opposition”, the President was merely questioning his wife’s competence, the same as that of the opposition, to advise him on issues he believes he possesses more “superior knowledge”. Whether it is right for the President to lump his wife with the opposition is another different issue entirely. But while the President might listen to his wife’s advice on domestic issues, he believes he doesn’t need her counsel on issues of governance. Like everybody else, the President reserves the right to decide which advice to take from his wife.

Going by his demeanor when the question was posed to him, it was clear that President Buhari merely wanted to trivialize the issue. So he said “I don’t know which party my wife belongs to, but she belongs to my kitchen, and my living room and the other room”. Mr. President was merely saying that he expected his wife to play a domestic role and not dabble into issues of governance. Now, I don’t think anyone would justifiably question the right of a man, even if that man is a king or president, to decide his expectations from his wife. Moreover, “I don’t know which party my wife belongs “ is not the same as “My wife cannot belong to a party or do politics”.  For instance, if I say that I don’t know which case my lawyer wife must take, but she must cook my meals and make my bed; does this mean that I am saying my wife cannot take any case at all? We all know what the President was saying, after all this is Africa where even career women know they must ‘belong in the kitchen and the other room' to keep their husbands and their homes.

The problem with President Buhari is that he doesn’t know how to be diplomatic, a nice euphemism for dressing the truth and telling half truths. He calls a spade a spade, and it doesn’t matter whether it is on NTA or CNN, or inside Aso Rock or Number 10. Aisha’s husband believes truth has no home, you say it wherever and whenever you are required to. Such is the case in the situation under reference where the President had to say the truth about the role of a traditional African woman, although he was sitting beside a woman who also happened to be his host.

Of all the people forming ‘women defender' on social media, how many of them treat their wives as equal? If we lift up the veil that disguise the shabby manner many of them treat their spouses, they would then begin to lecture us that even God does not intend a woman to be equal to man. By then, they would suddenly realize that the Lord did say that “we shall create for you a helpmate” and not a partner.

Owing to the high unemployment rate in the country, we all know many women are either jobless or partially employed, a situation that has inevitably reduced them to full housewives and placed them in the kitchen. So why are we pretending as if we do not know? Before NGO became a business and a pastime for State First Ladies, are governors' wives not full house wives? Did they not belong perpetually to their husbands’ kitchens?

There is something fundamentally wrong with the way our gender activists undertake their advocacy. Now, they are shouting that the President is reducing women to mere kitchen attendants, but they won’t to tell us the many grown up women that serve as cooks in their own houses. Are those women not equally deserving of a role outside the kitchen and the “other room”. There is something hypocritical about employing an uneducated woman to cook your meal and then come on social media to preach that women should not be limited to the kitchen. Is life outside the kitchen only suitable for some species of women? Is every woman not equally deserving?

What the President’s remarks has thrown up is the penchant of our hypocritical gender activists to defend issues that affect mostly the elite women. It is common knowledge that we are still struggling to increase the access the girl child has to education. In many homes, it is the women who, for one reason or the other, could not be educated that cook for our elite women who do not want to belong to the kitchen. Are they not equally deserving? Indeed, if we must help women, we must commit to supporting the education of the girl child in order to attain the sustainable Development Goal of empowering all class of women and achieving gender equality.