Kukan Kurciya

It is great wisdom we are asked to keep our women home. The world is becoming more and more dangerous, especially for the weak and the venerable.

Every day, we hear of women stories experiencing tragic encounters. Beside sexual harassment and molestation, they also needlessly experience harsh realities of life first-hand and several other forms difficulties.

I often unconsciously develop a genuine feeling for working women, seeing them in the streets, in the scorching sun.

This lady shouldn’t be there, I would say to myself.

My feeling normally falls massively on ladies in the banks, as I see them roaming the streets, weary and frazzled struggling to meet targets given to them by their managers, shedding off their dignity and prestige, fawning and crawling and licking the ass of a potential customer.

People are unscrupulous, opportunistic! They attach and calculate extra meaning to every single association. For mere ordinary greeting, things would take different shape, rushing into their head. Her smile would mean inviting. And she dresses in such a way that the things in her chest are in public glare, potentially reinforcing their view.

Everyone feeds on that.  Those employing the girls and the people they are sent to meet. She would go, like a cow sent to slaughterhouse!

The dignity of women should be protected, in every way possible, by every means necessary.

Women are protected out of sheer love and feeling. It is isn’t impressive when you can protect your daughter or wife to allow her go through difficulties. It is with immense pleasure to see a woman in relaxed condition and ease, and love people who understand this wisdom.

You cannot see the wife of Aliko Dangote, the richest man in Africa, struggling in office. You cannot see a royal lady gutting off herself in office.

I realized that a very few successful men the world over wish to allow their wives to burden themselves with work. They tend to assign light responsibilities to them -- small works blurring to hobby -- in charity and foundation. They prefer a private life.

But I am sure these families are educated. They won’t marry unschooled and ignorant wife. That is the case with our ulamas and politicians.

Women have little presence in full-pledged public life. When politicians begin to smuggle their families into active politics, so-and-so member House of Assembly, XYZ political party, Dala Federal Constituency, and then you hear his wife is a national women leader in the opposition party, then you know that parents should reconsider.

Traditional values and social demographics have experienced elemental shifts, disrupted and dislodged by new, emerging circumstances unknown before, notably climate change and increased human population. Combined, these changes changed life and made things difficult on earth.

Parents used to feed their son, his two or three wives and dozens of children. That was past. It is hard to happen now, say economic realities.

How do you go about facing these challenges?

There is the need to make painful adjustments and adopting new techniques.

The years you spend schooling is meant to prepare you to withstand hardship, help you acquire resilience, to learn to be passively relentless, and instill in you dogged determination, all making you patiently and silently ambitious.  

But the struggle of these women is as well valuable. I nearly gave up an opportunity when, in the process, I met stiff hardship and difficulty. I had to cling tenaciously when all I saw when I glanced around were women who had gone through the same process and were having their last laugh.

Their stories gave me strength, inspiration and will-power. Those young women and married women have yet again raised the bar. 

Presently, it is evident new circumstances force women out of home to engage in almost any works that were originally left for men. These works they do are mostly menial and humiliating jobs. When you see them, you can’t miss the pain and regret in their eyes. You can read their mind:

I wished I have had better opportunity, I would have been great.

Many girls are rushed into marriage. A year or two, when unfortunately the marriage broke, they would return to school. Precious times wasted unnecessarily.

Otherwise, at that moment, they could have been somewhere, doing something with their lives. They could have passed that level and moved on with their lives.

At what point parents would learn to think rationally?

Proactive measures won’t hurt.

Take control of your situation. Think big. Think ahead. Think future in order not be helplessly willing victim of your situation. Give woman opportunity so that she can have sense of pride and dignity in her life and work.

Ps

My friend has an aunty who could have been a federal minister, but someone somewhere made a wrong decision when she was young. It’s with pain when she spoke about her peer, who was then serving ministerial post. Yearning and envy in her tone.

We too have been terribly affected. Who knows, had she become a minister, we would have pompously driven Abuja streets zoom zoom.