In the face of the country's plethora of problems, its artists continue on.
For as long as I’ve been alive, I’ve been aware of Nigeria’s potential.
Globally, this potential has largely been measured by the country’s natural resources, from relatively recent (and continuing) discoveries of rare earth elements, to crude oil, its greatest export commodity, and arguably also its greatest curse. Discovered some years short of independence from British colonial rule in 1960, oil has been the main cause of poverty and ecological degradation in the Delta region, often stagnating development in Nigeria’s other industries due to over-reliance on its “black gold”.
Then, there’s the potential of our country’s expansive 230 million-plus population, consisting of over 400 ethnic groups (or 500, depending on how they’re counted), with just as many languages. Equally important is our religious diversity, composed largely of Muslims and Christians, as well as practitioners of various traditional religions, the latter sometimes performed (quietly) alongside the Abrahamic faiths. Increasingly, if only marginally, there’s also a rise in irreligiosity and atheism among Nigeria’s youth, noteworthy because Nigerians are, on average, a deeply religious (pontificating and practicing) people.
There is also the potential of our diaspora. From the time of independence or even before it, the Nigerian diaspora has produced notable writers, artists, and musicians, a feat that has only grown as the country’s entertainment industries, especially in music and film, have exploded in the last decade. Notwithstanding the prevalence of a “scammer” stereotype, Nigerians in diaspora—especially in the West—stand out as among the most educated, flourishing immigrant populations across variouscountries. Last year, Nigerians abroad even remitted over $20 billion back to the country, exceeding its foreign direct investment. This statistic does more than simply demonstrate the economic success enjoyed by many Nigerians abroad; it offers insight into the intimate connections we have to the nation of our birth—or of our parents’ or grandparents' birth. It also shows that, where the government has failed to create economic conditions for the average Nigerian to meet their basic needs, Nigerians individually and collectively have offered the necessary support to fill the gap.
This, however, reveals a truth that has persisted from one generation to the next: Nigeria’s potential has not staved off its reality.
"I’ve found myself inching ever closer to a resignation that what Nigeria may mostly have in my lifetime is potential."
While the truth of any country exists beyond what data reveals, it cannot be entirely ignored. The numbers show that by most measures, Nigerians at home are collectively worse off than they were even a decade ago. Its GDP per capita, for example, has fallen to an estimated $835.49 this year; just four years ago, that figure was $2,057. Unsurprisingly, this has meant an exacerbation of extreme poverty, even as, notoriously, the combined worth of the nation’s five wealthiest people could put an end to it should they so choose.
Just as unsurprising is that Nigeria’s rate of unemployment remains high, despite the National Bureau of Statistics’ recent manipulation to arrive at the now low 4.3% figure, after surpassing 30% unemployment just a few years ago. Simultaneously, the cost of living in Nigeria has escalated to its worst in a generation, while rising security concerns, rife in different parts of the country for different reasons, have made it difficult to determine the sheer scale of crime nationally.
Put together, then, the potential of Nigeria is exponential. But the reality of Nigeria is we have a multigenerational kleptocratic political class with little interest in strengthening the nation’s institutions or improving the lives of ordinary people. Whatever improvements have been made—for decades—have been in spite of this class, and often by the sheer will of persistent individuals and grassroots community initiatives.
"Seeing the cultural and artistic production of Nigerians once again revived my belief that hope must be a practice."
You might not know any of this, of course, if you only frequent, or are attentive to, the country during its Detty December period, where the weeks-long partying never ends in the palatable parts of its Lagos metropolis. Even with hiked prices and complaints from Nigerians at home and abroad, who go less for the merriment than to visit family, the period shows no signs of easing. People anywhere, I believe, have a right to enjoyment despite whatever depths of despair we may find ourselves in. But when does this enjoyment start to become smoke and mirrors for the lack—and a desensitization to the lack—experienced by most Nigerians?
If it sounds like I am describing a country on the brink, my visits in the last two years, especially, have felt like I was witnessing it, too. This is the same country where many of our parents survived a late ’60s civil war and perennial eras of dictatorship through to the ’90s. And yet, the country today seems somehow less tolerable, because the last decade of governance has revealed even the smallest gains can be reversed; that this is not a developing country, but a regressing one.
Having frequently meditated on the state of the nation’s potential versus its reality, I’ve found myself inching ever closer to a resignation that what Nigeria may mostly have in my lifetime is potential—and a potential that will never even be minorly realized. What’s more is that the values that Nigerians ordinarily uphold—our ability to persevere, to get through, to make good of what is bad—is also ultimately what holds us back. Realizing this made me all the more hopeless, because how do a people resist over time and collectively when enough is never enough?
With all of this on my mind, last November, visiting Nigeria yet again, I was apprehensive; despite my own relative economic privilege, I’ve been enjoying my stays less, considering them more a labor of my particular family culture than a joyful homecoming. This visit, lasting less than 10 days, would be dominated by art and art makers across two cities—Lagos and Benin City. I’d also be making it to my ancestral hometown, Ughelli, in the Delta.
Yet for all my apprehensions, I found myself less fatigued by the state of the country than contemplative. While I would witness many swaths of society that spoke to the country’s regression, seeing the cultural and artistic production of Nigerians once again revived my belief that hope must be a practice.
Photographs from J.D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere's Hairstyles exhibit at MAMCO in 2001. (Photo courtesy of MAMCO / Wikimedia Commons.)
In its tenth year, ART X Lagos provided me with a swanky welcome as I encountered the who’s who of the Lagos art scene and beyond, the international fair now among Africa’s largest. Well-curated with numerous official and unofficial events, you would have to try to have a bad time. There were symposiums dedicated to the country’s different postcolonial art schools featuring the likes of Chief Nike Davies-Okundaye, founder of one of the largest art galleries in West Africa, named after herself. Then there was the live photography studio inspired by the late J.D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere, who captured Nigerians’ hairstyles as an artistic process, reminding us of the great value of art as a cultural archive.
In the midst of craftspeople, visual artists, sculptors—upcoming and established—there was also hearteningly, programming for children, inviting them to be art makers at a young age. Away from ART X Lagos, the Fela Kuti: Afrobeat Rebellion immersive exhibition, ongoing since October, was a gratifying celebration of perhaps one of Nigeria’s most notable cultural icons. Savoring it all, the only reservation I had was a familiar one—that more than just well-off Lagosians and visitors deserve access to such things, too.
Leaving for Benin City shortly after—the old historic home of the once powerful Edo nation, famous for the Benin Bronzes—I attended the inaugural Black Music Art Festival, established by the artist Victor Ehikhamenor. The fair showcased exhibitions and a remarkable new Sculpture Park, all done in tandem with local Nigerians and featuring a plethora of young artists, including Osaru Obaseki. A multidisciplinary artist who won the surprise first prize on opening night, Obaseki stood out for many reasons, but most notably to me, for her incorporation of bronze casting, traditionally done by men. Between her work and that of her contemporaries, innovation was everywhere I looked, including in the mixed media installation Invisible Pedestrians by Seidougha Linus Eyimiegha, AKA Mr. Danfo, and a studio visit with artist Derek Jombo, who blends surrealism with classical realism in portraits of postcolonial Nigerians.
Osaru Obaseki. (Photo courtesy of the artist.)
On the way to Ughelli, four hours by road from Benin, I traveled with a colleague turned friend, Agohogo Otega, a photojournalist and artist whose work I was finally able to purchase after years of eyeing a particular piece showcasing our hometown’s sunrise. Once in Ughelli, I spent time with a cousin I don’t often see, who has turned his artistic vocations from music to visual art once again. He shared his work with me as he told me of his future plans of pursuit.
I had not wanted the best Nigeria has to offer to trick me into succumbing once again into narratives of our potential, and it didn’t. But what happened in spending time with the full range of artists—from those who have international acclaim to those who struggle to afford the most basic items for their practice—was a reminder that while I’ve never had much faith in the Nigerian political class, if I’m to maintain my ties to the country as a whole, I cannot afford to give up on its people.
"Nigerians—and that is, ordinary Nigerians—refuse to sacrifice art at the altar of the country’s plethora of problems."
This includes their many achievements despite the countless factors working against them. Aside from art, even with inadequate infrastructural support, everything from agritech businesses to renewable energy companies are still advancing, continually exhibiting to those that control the nation’s purse strings what the future could be, long before they’ve invested in it. Despite the very real partly religious conflicts and sometimes ensuing violence that has occurred in various parts of the country, for the most part, we also do more than tolerate each other: I was born in Ibadan, and if you’ve ever been there, you know that one’s neighbors are just as likely to be Christian as they are to be Muslim (or traditionalists) and celebrating each other’s festivities is part of the city’s ethos. There are many more Ibadans in Nigeria than not.
It’s why the characterization of Western (and Western-minded)politicians and pundits who don’t understand (or intentionally misunderstand) the complex dynamics of the nation—quick to weaponize “Christian genocide” rhetoric—are speaking out of turn; there are too many additional factors at play to oversimplify our national woes. It is true that Nigeria has an ethnocentrism problem that has seldom been adequately examined in the context of power and privilege, akin to racism. But for a people who still embody the memory of our once independent precolonial nations, that we have never really had many leaders keen to unite us—and in fact have leaders even today who weaponize our differences—my sense is we often belittle our everyday congeniality towards each other. A congeniality I would like to see more of in how we regard each other’s cultural expressions.
Derek Jombo. (Photo courtesy of the artist.)
Given all the tragedies of Nigeria, I remain astonished at the art and the artists the country produces. For a country that is in such dire straits, that quite frankly, has so much for its ordinary citizens to be attentive to, and where institutional support for the creative industries is dire, our artistic production feels like a small miracle. Beyond this, Nigerian families are notorious, if stereotyped, as discouraging their children from artistic undertakings, preferring they go into “practical” fields—medicine, engineering, or otherwise. Of course, there is also the wide gap of privilege: The difference between what a wealthy child is exposed to in Lagos artistically, and what a child from the working poor will be exposed to in Lagos, or Ughelli, or Benin, is great—a distance that ordinarily only exacerbates my despair. But I’d be lying if I didn't admit that it also gives me hope that Nigerians—and that is, ordinary Nigerians—refuse to sacrifice art at the altar of the country’s plethora of problems, as something only to be pursued by the elite.
It is here that Nigeria’s potential merges with its reality. Whether accompanied with other “practical work,” or disappointing their families, or restricting themselves to smaller towns and cities, Nigeria’s artists continue on. Many, without fame and certainly almost no fortune, continue on. And little else can explain why, other than because they can’t help themselves. It is something they must do, even with no fairytale ending in sight, because the art itself is the point. This, above all, is where the unexpected hope lies among a people obsessed with reaping the fruits of one’s labor: that even still, in spite of our condition, creating itself, and not its aftermath, is what matters most.
[post_title] => Where Nigeria's Potential Meets Its Reality
[post_excerpt] => In the face of the country's plethora of problems, its artists continue on.
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Nerima Wako Ojiwa on technology, youth-led democracy, and organizing at the speed of crisis.
Peacebuilding does not always unfold slowly.
Sometimes, it happens in moments of crisis—when institutions fail, when violence is imminent, and when the only thing standing between disappearance and survival is collective action.
This is where Nerima Wako Ojiwa enters the story.
As the founder and executive director of Siasa Place, one of Kenya’s most influential youth-led political organizations, Nerima represents a proactive and vital expression of feminist peacebuilding: fast, adaptive, deeply networked, and rooted in solidarity, showing how democracy must often be defended in real time.
From Distance to Determination
Nerima’s political awakening began far from home. In 2012, while interning in Washington, D.C. with Search for Common Ground, she watched conflict escalate in East Africa and felt the weight of distance—geographic and political.
“I felt removed,” she says. “And that made me question not just what was happening there, but what was happening at home in Kenya.”
When she returned, she noticed a gap between activism and politics that led to systemic change. Youth organizations existed, but few were willing to engage in or with politics directly, whether governance, policy, or power. Online spaces for serious political debate were rare.
So, she decided to help create one.
Siasa Place—siasa meaning “politics” in Swahili—was designed as an explicitly political, youth-centered, digital-first space. Its purpose was simple and radical: to give young people room to deliberate about their future, to organize collectively, and to reclaim politics as somewhere they belong.
Feminist Leadership in a Hostile Arena
Leading this kind of space as a young woman in Kenya came with immediate costs. Nerima was in her early twenties at the time—petite, outspoken, and operating in a deeply male-dominated political environment. She encountered disbelief, harassment, and persistent assumptions that a man must be behind her work.
“There has to be a godfather,” people said. Or a rich uncle. Or a political patron.
But Nerima was doing everything herself.
For years, she ran Siasa Place without funding, navigating precarity while building credibility. She also learned—like many women before her—how to protect herself, adapting her behavior to avoid advances from men in ways that reshaped her leadership and hardened her resolve.
Perhaps the most telling moment, however, came later, when Nerima was debating running for office herself—and a male colleague told her she should not run for a women’s political seat because she’d transcended gender entirely. (Kenya has constitutional female quotas in parliament, mandating that no more than two-thirds of members in elective or appointive bodies can be of the same gender. However, the country has struggled to meet this quota, with women holding about 23% of parliamentary seats as of 2022.)
It was meant as praise. It revealed the cost of legitimacy.
Organizing as Peacebuilding
Unlike many leaders trained through formal mentorship, Nerima learned to organize through crisis.
The most recent example still reverberates. In May 2025, activists Boniface Mwangi of Kenya and Agather Atuhaire of Uganda were abducted in Tanzania after showing solidarity with an opposition leader. Nerima helped coordinate a rapid-response network across borders—using encrypted messaging, social media amplification, and collective pressure.
Four days later, both were released.
“They couldn’t kill us because people were making too much noise online,” Agather later told her.
This experience underscored Nerima’s belief that if you are not involved in politics, if there is no good governance, you're not going to be able to have a good—or safe—life. “And that's what we translate in all of our Siasa Place forums,” she says. “This is why you should be engaged, because everything is a political decision.”
Technology, Deliberation, and Power
At Siasa Place, technology is not treated as a single solution but as a menu of tools, deployed intentionally at different moments:
TikTok to raise awareness and funds.
Messaging platforms to coordinate action.
Deliberative technologies like Polis and Remesh to shape policy outcomes.
What Nerima values most about these tools is their refusal of hierarchy. Influence cannot be bought or performed, and participants must think for themselves.
For a generation shaped by influencers and algorithmic culture, this kind of engagement carries real weight—and it works. One striking example: Youth participation through Siasa Place pressured the Kenyan government into withdrawing a proposal that would have cut funding for youth programming entirely. The outcome showed that when young people organize and speak collectively, they can shift policy directly.
Nerima sees her work as bridging the gap between mobilization and meaningful political participation. "We are channeling our people to understand how policy works," she explains, "and why inclusive involvement matters for the betterment of the majority—rather than allowing purely selfish actors to dominate these spaces." She also points to progress on more fundamental challenges, like making information accessible so that people can engage without feeling locked out of the process.
Mutual Aid as Feminist Democracy
Perhaps the most powerful shift Nerima describes is cultural. Kenyan youth—many disillusioned by the state—have begun to act as one another’s safety net. They have raised millions to bail out protesters, cover medical bills, and support families in crisis.
This is not issue-based activism. It is solidarity as infrastructure.
And it is being led, overwhelmingly, by young women.
Refusing Erasure
Before we end our conversation, Nerima raises a final concern—one that echoes across feminist history.
“These movements are being led by women,” she says. “And women get erased.”
Technology, she believes, gives us a chance to interrupt that pattern—to document leadership, to create an archive of memory as it happens, to leave digital footprints that future generations can trace. For Nerima, this preservation is through Siasa Place. But each of us is capable of participating in it—because the act of recording is itself a form of peacebuilding, as is the full spectrum of feminist democratic work today: patient and urgent, institutional and insurgent, grounded in care and driven by courage.
The first step is simply to choose to take part.
[post_title] => We Will Be Our Own Safety Net
[post_excerpt] => Nerima Wako Ojiwa on technology, youth-led democracy, and organizing at the speed of crisis.
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How Kenya's grocery stores might be hurting local farmers.
When the Mauritian private equity fund, Adenia Capital IV, bought Kenyan supermarket chain Quickmart and merged it with rival Tumaimi in 2019, the benefits to investors were obvious. Under the terms, all 13 Tumaimi stores in Kenya would rebrand as Quickmarts, making it the third-largest supermarket chain in Kenya by number of stores overnight. In a joint statement, the two supermarket chains said this new entity would “enhance the capacity to accelerate expansion” and bolster “operational efficiencies.” With an influx of capital, the expanded Quickmart was also poised to buy up smaller stores around the country and become an even larger retail powerhouse, extending its operations beyond dense shopping areas and into quieter residential areas on the periphery of Kenya’s major cities.
Beyond lower prices and expanded access, Quickmart and its private equity owner also spoke of social advantages for ordinary Kenyans. At the time of the merger, 14,000 farmers across the country supplied the chain. With time, Quickmart expected them to supply about 30 percent of its fresh produce. In a country where an estimated 40 percent of people derive at least some of their income from agriculture, the promise of more opportunities for farmers looked like a benefit for everyone.
Since exploding onto the scene in the early 2000s, there’s been a steady rise in supermarkets across Kenya. In 2002, there were four supermarket chains in the country; by 2018, there were ten. Though more “informal” operations, like market stalls, still account for the vast majority of Kenyan grocery sales, in 2020, the proportion of groceries sold through supermarkets was as high as 15 percent. By the end of the decade, such “modern retailers” could account for as much as 25 percent of sales, according to a report from Boston Consulting Group.
It’s a similar story across the developing world, where supermarkets are rapidly displacing other retailers to become the place of choice to buy food. In doing so, supermarkets have become a major force in the Global South, not just in retailing, but in agricultural purchasing. But a closer look shows the new phenomenon has often done more harm than good for the small farmers these supermarket chains and their investors claim to help.
~
Well into the 20th century, buying groceries in the United States was a lot like buying them in many parts of Africa today: Different vendors sold different items, like meat, produce, oil, or rice, independently, but in close proximity.
As journalist Benjamin Lorr explains in his book, The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket, the idea of a big store that sells everything in one place only goes back a century. Michael Cullen, the New Jersey grocer who pioneered the supermarket concept, struggled and failed to persuade colleagues about its viability for years. But when he opened his King Kullen store—the first supermarket in history—in New York in 1930, the Great Depression was raging, and the store’s wide range of heavily discounted offerings quickly proved indispensable to legions of customers. Other stores soon followed.
“They came with names like Big Bear, Giant Tiger, Bull Market, Great Leopard, announcing their size and price-chopping ferocity with a zoological zeal that puzzles the modern ear,” Lorr writes. “Adding in-store mascots and costumes, parades and pullout advertisements, each trying to pile up merchandise into ever higher displays of abundance.”
By the 1960s, virtually every new grocery store in America was a supermarket, and regional and national chains like Safeway and Kroger became household names throughout the country. Since big supermarkets meant big parking lots, people could also bring their cars—by then an indispensable part of modern life. And because these stores offered everything in one place, families could load up for the week in a single transaction.
Size came with a cost advantage, both for stores and for customers. By buying so much food at once, supermarkets could insist on lower prices from farmers, then sell it to consumers for less than their smaller competitors, thus drawing more people and fueling their own expansion.
But the supermarkets’ edge was often their suppliers’ curse. Dealing with a big supermarket chain meant farmers could sell vast amounts of their products, but it also made them beholden to them. Some farmers got by under this new regime by adapting the stores’ model for themselves, consolidating with each other, getting bigger, and selling at volume to make up for the smaller margins on each item. More often, however, farmers went out of business entirely.
In developing countries today, farmers are facing a similar threat. As a report from the African Climate Foundation recently found, rising supermarket chains typically impose burdensome costs onto farmers in the form of “fees, terms and supply conditions” that only the very largest farmers can endure.
In Kenya, smaller farmers are already suffering. In 2016, the Competitive Authority of Kenya (CAK), a government agency formed to regulate market competition, found that a number of supermarkets had abused their power by pressing new fees onto suppliers after signing contracts. Soon after, Kenya became only the second country in Africa, after South Africa, to prohibit such abuses in legislation.
Kenya and South Africa’s relative affluence may distinguish them from most countries in Africa, but, as supermarkets spread across the continent, they offer a warning of how supermarkets can harm farmers, even with regulations in place. In 2023, CAK hit the local operators of Carrefour, a French supermarket chain, with a record $8.5 million fine after concluding that the chain had climbed the ranks in Kenya’s supermarket industry by demanding crushing discounts from suppliers with one hand, while promoting impossibly low prices to consumers with the other. Carrefour has said it will appeal the decision, but it’s not the first time the company and its local partners have been accused of harming a supplier. A few years earlier, CAK ruled against Carrefour’s local operators after a Kenyan yogurt producer, Orchards, argued it had been forced to give Carrefour steep discounts and even free merchandise that the supermarket later turned around and sold.
Kenya’s high court upheld the ruling last year. By then, Orchards had already gone out of business.
~
You might think consumer demand is the sole driving force behind the rise in supermarkets in the Global South. It’s true that in Kenya and other developing countries, an emergent class of consumers has come to expect the same luxuries that people in the United States and Europe have long enjoyed. But the worldwide shift towards supermarkets isn’t just a free market trend: It’s aided by a heavy hand from taxpayers in the Global North.
When Adenia Capital IV purchased Quickmart in 2019, more than 40 percent of the fund’s €230 million came from government-controlled development finance institutions. Development banks from Belgium, France, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Austria, and Germany all contributed, as well, along with two multilateral banks—the International Finance Corporation (IFC), part of the World Bank Group, and the European Investment Bank, the European Union’s development bank.
Similar taxpayer-funded institutions underwrite supermarkets all over the developing world. In the last two years alone, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, another development bank, has invested in supermarket chains in Uzbekistan, Romania, Turkey, Albania, and elsewhere. In 2025, the IFC promised up to $30 million to help Kazyon, an Egyptian chain, expand in Morocco. Two years before, Kazyon also received $165 million from Development Partners International, a private equity fund backed by development banks from France and the UK.
European development banks are typically mandated to use their capital to alleviate poverty in developing countries, and often justify investments in supermarkets as a means of helping women and “modernizing” agricultural economies. Consider the Netherlands’ development bank, FMO, which provided $23 million to Azerbaijan’s Araz Supermarket in 2024 to help it build a new distribution facility. FMO said the investment would “contribute to gender equality” since Araz employed a number of women. The bank also said it would help Araz provide “modern working conditions” in a poor region of the country.
But despite investors’ claims, history has shown that the rise and consolidation of supermarkets is usually also bad news for small farmers. Development banks may tout an altruistic mission, but the supermarkets appeal to them for the same reason they appeal to commercial banks: not because they support local agriculture or gender equality, but because they are reliable investments. What benefits they provide to rural communities is less important than whether they grow and turn a profit.
One way to make conditions more equitable for farmers is to implement regulations that dictate what supermarkets can and cannot do to suppliers. Since 2010, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand have adopted mandatory codes that bar grocers from practices like changing the terms of a supplier contract unilaterally or delaying payments to suppliers. In Africa, two countries—Kenya and Namibia—have adopted similar codes; though, for now, adherence is voluntary. That’s an inherent weakness: As the African Climate Foundation notes—and as Kenya’s recent history of supermarket-supplier relations has demonstrated—true change requires enforcement.
Development banks could also play a role in obliging countries to adopt these stronger regulations. By promising to invest in supermarkets only in countries that have adopted mandatory codes of conduct, a bank like the IFC could ensure its capital does more to help than harm the small farmers—not just in Africa, but in developing countries around the world—on whose labor agricultural economies depend.
[post_title] => The Troubling Rise of Supermarkets in the Global South
[post_excerpt] => How Kenya's grocery stores might be hurting local farmers.
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“Who are these people who are not seeing that our people are dying?”
Njeru municipality, located in Uganda's Buikwe district, is a scenic area where the River Nile flows out of Lake Victoria. While the locale attracts tourists, who go swimming, canoeing, and rafting in these waters, the region has also seen a drastic transformation in recent years, drawing large industries that provide employment opportunities for Uganda's young population. They often get work as machine operators or production workers, sorting and packaging at these factories. But while economically beneficial to some, these industries are also increasing pollution in the water, air, and environment—threatening the health of the region for tourists, youth workers, and long-time residents alike.
Since 2019, through the Uganda Investment Authority, the Ugandan government has allocated 956 acres of land for industries in Buikwe district as part of Vision 2040, an economic initiative that aims to transform Uganda into a modern and prosperous country within 30 years. But many locals suggest the government has fallen short in regulating these industries, leading to disastrous repercussions: It’s almost certain you’ll engage with some form of factory pollution in the region, via inhaling smog or coming into contact with the polluted water that flows into the Nile.
While Uganda’s 2019 National Environmental Act requires industries to treat their effluent before discharging it into water bodies, many businesses in the region do not comply. In Bujowali village, for example, the steel manufacturing company Pramukh Steel Limited releases wastewater into the Naava stream without proper treatment. Residents are concerned about the pollution, which affects their main water source, and consequently, their health.
On a warm day in March, the wet season fully underway, three women stand akimbo, atop a drainage channel being constructed across the marram road from Pramukh factory. In the channel, about a dozen men are hard at work lifting stones and mixing sand and cement while a supervisor hovers over them.
One of the women is Wazemba Annet Jackline, a resident of Bujowali village, and a local area councilor. “This is the only clean water stream we have in the village,” she says. “But now, we cannot take the water without boiling it first. It is no longer safe, it's contaminated.”
The steel company not only releases dust and sludge into the region’s water and air, but also mill scale, which pollutes the air with small particles that can be ingested by people and animals in close proximity to the factory. Residents have reported cases of illnesses such as diarrhea, cough, and flu. There are also some unconfirmed cases of cancer and allegations of animals dying due to the pollution. What’s more, the company’s factory also releases wastewater with a foul smell during the dry season, and even larger quantities mixed with fecal matter during the rainy season, which flows into the lower end of the stream.
In March this year, after a series of negotiations, Pramukh agreed to build the water drainage channel in response to complaints from Bujowali’s residents. Unfortunately, the construction materials they’ve used cannot withstand the water flow from the factory or the region’s heavy rains. Residents say this is the third time the channel is being constructed, with the same materials, after previous attempts have collapsed.
“They are reconstructing in the same place every day. The type of cement they are using will take time to set, yet this is a water-logged area,” says Jackline, who is a civil engineer by profession. “I’m asking them to reconsider the type of cement they are using. As much as they are looking at cutting costs, the cement type I’m suggesting only hydrates when it rains, and the mixture gets stronger instead of being washed away.”
Her pleas, however, fall on deaf ears as the workers continue with their work.
On the frontlines of the environmental fight in the region is Girls for Climate Action, an eco-feminist movement founded in Jinja district, advocating for climate justice and action in Buikwe. The organization has partnered with the community to address industrial pollution and promote sustainable practices under the campaign “Toa Uchafu,” a Swahili word meaning, “remove the garbage,” a call to end industrial water pollution in Buikwe.
The campaign highlights how the region’s industries are not complying with Uganda’s National Environment Management Authority (NEMA) standards, says Viola Kataike, the organization’s advocacy lead. “[They] pollute the different eco-systems that the community—especially women and girls—depend on for their livelihoods,” she adds.
The factories have also led to the displacement of some of the region’s long-time residents. Kataike cites an example of a woman she says is currently being forced to leave her land, where her late husband is buried. “She is crying out,” she says. “How is she going to move her husband’s remains because now the land supposedly belongs to the factory? It’s traumatic.”
Girls for Climate Action has also carried out a situational analysis of the pollution levels for existing industries in Buikwe, measuring contamination in the different natural water sources. According to Kataike, the results were revealing. “These industries have taken the opportunity to release their waste and effluents into River Nile, but of course channel it through the streams that the communities fetch water from.”
This pollution is also affecting the farming community throughout the Buikwe district. Farmers report crop damage, animal deaths, and health problems such as itchy eyes and skin, as well as inflamed skin that turns ashy after contact with the contaminated water.
At a community meeting held in March at the Mubeeya cultural site in Nyenga in Njeru municipality, farmers expressed distress at the pollution of the Mubeeya stream caused by the sugar, spirits, and plastics manufacturing company, GM Sugar. The farmers, most of whom are rice growers, raised a number of complaints.
“During the night, you can't sleep, the water stinks,” says 44-year-old Godfrey Walusimbi, a farmer who has spent his whole life in Buikwe. “You can't give your cattle the water, if they drink it, our cattle fall sick. I lost two goats.”
Some farmers also say their crops are being burnt up by the chemicals now contaminating the ground. “The acid in the soil has killed the soil fertility and crops are drying up in the garden,” Walusimbi says.
In the town of Njeru itself, which is centrally located in Buikwe, councilor Ibriata Clarke says that a factory located next to a secondary school has water trenches that run through the school’s playfield. She also says some representatives have tried to speak to factory management but are constantly being sent away. “We’ve been told not to complain about what the factories are doing to our people,” she says—but, she adds, “Who are these people who are not seeing that our people in Njeru municipality are dying?”
A Buikwe district officer who asked that they remain unnamed but whose role offers relevant insight, says they have carried out several tests, and there is proof that industrial chemicals have polluted the water, soil, and air in the locality. According to them, “While the recommended chemical oxygen demand in the water is 50, in Njeru, it is much higher, which is proof the water is polluted.” With residents reporting headaches, stomach pains, and skin reactions, the immediate solution, they say, is to stop using the water, concluding that it is corrosive.
However, they added that farmers who use agro chemicals and pesticides to kill weeds are also partially to blame. “During the rainy season, those chemicals sink into the sand and the water runs off into the streams,” they explain.
As environmental incidents continue to gain attention in the district, a court case between a local farmer, Allan John Ddamulira, and GM Sugar has come to underscore Buikwe’s industrial pollution problem.
Ddamulira claims that GM Sugar's discharge of toxic waste into the Kinywa water stream killed his fish and damaged his farm, which consisted of eight fishponds located on 10 acres. “Unknowingly to us, the water that was flowing through the stream that day had been polluted with molasses from the sugar factory,” he says. “So, we woke up to a fish kill. All the fish were floating, dead.”
In September 2022, Ddamulira registered a formal complaint with NEMA in Uganda’s capital city, Kampala.“Results comparing the stream water and the water from the ponds revealed there was an oxygen deficiency that resulted in the fish kill at the farm,” Ddamulira says.
Following their investigation, NEMA issued a stop order to GM Sugar to cease the company’s release of effluent into the stream, but Ddamulira says the order has never been respected. He has since taken GM Sugar to court, and has accused NEMA of withholding evidence that would be useful in his case.
In February 2024, through his lawyers, Ddadmulira wrote to NEMA requesting that the environmental authority share their findings with them, to be presented in court. But in a letter dated March 22, 2024, NEMA’s Executive Director, Barirega Akankwasah, stated that the matter was still under criminal investigation and consequently would not hand over copies of the technical expert report, stop order, or photographs taken at the site. He added that their refusal was protected by law. When contacted for comment, NEMA spokesperson Noame Karekaho responded, “Discussing the issue of GM Sugar and degradation of the environment are considered ‘subjudice.’”
GM Sugar’s Head of Legal has also denied Ddadmulira’s claims, saying the company has the latest technology from Germany handling its waste. “The company waste does not flow to the stream as the complainant claims. We usually take our waste to the Buikwe Industrial Park.” In court, Ddamulira produced a video of a GM Sugar vehicle pouring waste near the fish farm, disputing this was the case. However, GM Sugar argued that the “errant driver was asked by the villagers to release the waste into the road to allegedly reduce the dust which was about 15km from the fish pond.”
Still, Ddamulira fights on. “We need to pursue this case to get these people to understand that what they are doing is wrong and get justice for myself and many other farmers suffering because of this pollution,” he says. He claims he has lost 800m Uganda Shillings, or $218,000, as a result of the fish kill.
He also isn’t alone in this fight—and despite her frustrations, Kataike believes they are making an impact as community members increasingly voice their concerns. This is happening not just at meetings, but through peaceful protests and demands for action, including demands for more drainage channels. She adds, however, that not everyone has been supportive of their work: According to her, some community leaders are undermining their efforts by supporting the companies for selfish gains. “It’s a huge problem, especially with the small bribes that they give to a few leaders,” she says. “They also give false promises, offering positions to those who oppose them.”
Rather than slow their efforts, however, this has only further fueled them. Girls for Climate Action continues to raise awareness and empower the community to push the factories to adhere to the set environmental standards and to stop polluting, especially water sources. While Kataike expresses disappointment that the pollution persists, she promises their campaign against it will do the same. “If we don't act now, then when?” she asks. “Should we wait for the rest of the people to die, or should we support the community to create justice?”
[post_title] => One Ugandan Village's Fight Against Industrial Pollution
[post_excerpt] => “Who are these people who are not seeing that our people are dying?”
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Under international criminal law, apartheid only applies to discrimination based on race. A new open letter argues it should apply to gender discrimination, too.
In March of this year, a group of over 100 Iranian and Afghan women signatories published an open letter calling for the end of gender apartheid. The purpose of the letter was threefold: to raise awareness of what gender apartheid is, and how it's affecting women in Iran and Afghanistan; to encourage public statements and policy responses condemning these regimes; and to expand the definition of apartheid under international law. As the letter explains, currently, under international criminal law, use of the word apartheid is limited to race; but for years, activists around the world—and more specifically, in Iran and Afghanistan—have been using it to describe extreme, gender-based persecution, and the regimes that perpetrate it. The letter makes the case for why it's time we update the word's definition on the global stage.
Below, we spoke to one of the people behind the campaign, human rights lawyer Gissou Nia, on the letter's longterm goals, its challenges, and why language matters when it comes to gender persecution and apartheid.
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How did the open letter come to be? How did you get involved?
The open letter came about with a core group of Iranian and Afghan women signatories. The genesis of this is that women's rights activists in Afghanistan and Iran have been using the term "gender apartheid" for years to describe, essentially, a system of subjugation and oppression that they are being repressed by. [But] when I spoke to some of these activists, not all of them had actually been aware that gender apartheid is not currently a crime under international law. Gender was not a part of that definition.
Apartheid, as defined under international criminal law—whether it’s a part of crimes against humanity or not—only applies to racial apartheid. So, [we] thought, why don’t we just change the definition? There have been incredible legal academics and jurors who have [already] been working on this, like Karima Bennoune, and what we wanted to achieve with the campaign is to supercharge [their] efforts. It’s an unbranded campaign—so there’s no one organization attached to it.
I’m curious what differentiates an apartheid regime from other forms of gender discrimination.
It’s a great question. One of the main things that people have asked is how is this distinct from gender persecution, let’s say. With gender persecution, which is a crime against humanity as defined under the ICC Rome Statute, that’s a more broadly defined crime. There may be some instances of something that you could charge as gender persecution that would amount to gender apartheid, but gender apartheid describes a certain type of treatment. It really focuses on the structures. The word “apartheid” comes from the word “apart” in Afrikaans, born out of the historical experience of South Africa—but it’s really about keeping one group separate from another. Here, you could say that [it’s] men subjugating and dominating women for purposes of entrenching power. I think that’s the distinguishing factor. Certainly, that would amount to a case of gender persecution, as well, and we’re not saying that it’s either/or—we think these are all complementary. In the case of race, we have both racial apartheid and racial persecution; so there’s no reason that we can’t have gender apartheid, as well.
I’d also say that gender apartheid, as opposed to gender discrimination, is much more extreme. Certainly misogyny and patriarchy exist everywhere. There are gender discriminatory laws in many different countries, including in the US. But a gender apartheid regime is something that’s quite distinct and different. It basically is saying that women are not worth a man. In the case of Iran, a woman’s value is worth half that of a man, legally. So they’re removed from public spaces. That’s why in Afghanistan, women and girls are not allowed to be educated, [why] they’ve been taken out of employment. The Taliban recently said that Afghan women cannot work for the UN in Afghanistan. So it’s essentially the removal of women from public spaces and from public life. And that’s enshrined in the law: You are formally not worth a man, and we are going to repress you, because that’s how we’re going to keep this regime in power.
When you say their value is less, how is that defined?
So, for example—I’m a lawyer, so this one for me is especially grating—if I was to give testimony in a court in Iran, my testimony would be worth half that of a man. I also wouldn’t be able to travel outside of Iran without the permission of my husband or my male guardian. I couldn’t ride a bike, I couldn’t go to sporting stadiums. I would be barred from certain types of higher education. Women do not have equal capacity, inheritance, divorce, marriage rights—anything that relates to the family, they’re unequal. And, of course, there’s the mandatory hijab laws, which we know sparked the outrage over Mahsa Amini’s murder.
For this particular campaign, why did you choose Iran and Afghanistan specifically? There are other countries where, arguably, [gender apartheid] would apply.
Because we were campaigning [and] were successful in removing the Islamic Republic from the UN Commission on the Status of Women. Obviously all of that came about because of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement in Iran after Mahsa was killed at the hands of the Islamic Republic’s morality police. There were a lot of Afghan women activists that wrote me after that and were congratulating me. [But] Afghanistan was still on the UN Commission on the Status of Women. True, the Taliban is not formally recognized before the UN, so the representative is from the former government and basically doesn’t represent anybody. Nonetheless, they’re still there.
And it really struck me, that while we’re speaking about Woman, Life, Freedom in Iran, and while there’s been such a global outpouring of attention and action and policy engagement and energy, right across the border, our Afghan sisters are dealing with a horrendous situation, of which the globe is exhibiting some form of paralysis, and a lack of direction on how to improve their circumstances.
I think a lot of Iranian women who are championing women’s rights have been thinking about our Afghan sisters, who we’re tied to through shared borders, shared culture, and in some cases shared language. These issues are interlinked and they’re not separate, and so we’ve been keen to do some joint activism. It’s something a bit new in terms of campaigning, and certainly once the law is adopted or as discussions continue, there may be other women that choose to engage with it who feel that they’re living under gender apartheid regimes. This was a campaign that Iranian and Afghan women came together to launch, but it doesn’t preclude other groups of women wanting to [sign] or get involved with this advocacy or get behind this mission. Anybody can sign, and support. But the number of gender apartheid regimes in the world is actually pretty few.
How many people have signed it so far?
I haven’t checked lately to see what the tracker is, but it was something like 5000.
Can you talk me through the three chief demands the letter makes?
So basically, the [three demands] are the way that we envision [passing the law] would happen. I’ll just walk you through the timeline. In the immediate, first of all, there’s a lot of people who are not familiar with what the term apartheid is even, [especially] under the age of 35. However, most of the decision makers that we are seeking to engage with are above the age of 35, and they’re in government, and they have direct recollection of those events in the eighties [in South Africa] until the dismantling of the apartheid system in 1990. It has a real moral and resonant power for those decision makers, so part of this campaign is aimed around introducing the term gender apartheid, so people are familiar with what that actually means. What does apartheid refer to, what does it refer to in the context of Iran and Afghanistan, and why is this still going on.
The second thing is, we want parliaments around the world to issue resolutions condemning the apartheid in Afghanistan and Iran. That’s moving forward in Canada, in the UK, in New Zealand, and now we’re doing a lot of outreach to states in South America and Africa because we think that will be very important to have a global frame. This isn’t just a Western effort, and we want to make sure that is understood.
The ultimate goal is to have some of the legal frameworks that apply to apartheid amended or introduced to include gender apartheid. One of our main goals is to have gender apartheid included in the definition at the upcoming global convention on crimes against humanity. It should be adopted at the end of 2024, with any luck, and we want to be included.
Do you think the history of the term being so associated with race helps or hinders the movement?
Well, it’s not called racial apartheid. It’s just called apartheid. The reason that apartheid doesn’t include gender is because it was created in the 20th century out of the South Africa experience. I [also] think a lot of international criminal law [has been] created by men in small rooms, and not necessarily with women’s input and that’s changing. We see that there is an increased focus on gendered crimes. There’s even a reevaluation of the crime of genocide to focus more on the gendered aspects of it. Historically, people have assumed that genocide has to be mass killing, not realizing that actually, it could also just be sterilization, and those forms of genocide are much more focused around women.
The point is a lot of crimes that we grapple with are really viewed through more of a male lens, and there’s been a concrete effort to apply a gender lens to that. I think this ties into the reason why apartheid didn’t focus on gender. It wasn’t because there weren’t gender apartheid regimes. It was just because of the kind of dialogue that was happening in the 70s and the 80s and the 90s.
Longer term, what happens if you succeed in changing international law? What happens if [gender apartheid] is criminalized?
The biggest thing is just that then it’ll be possible to be prosecuted, and there’ll be a lot of new pathways for accountability. It also ultimately will enforce prosecution of crimes like gender persecution, as well, because prosecutors will start to think more deeply about the gender aspects of crime. But while the end goal might be to have this legally enshrined, really, the goals are all along the way. Because what we want to do is raise awareness about what this crime is, but also drive policy actions.
I mean, with South Africa, the ask was really to financially isolate that regime and to get people—governments, companies—to stop doing business with them. With Iran and Afghanistan, they’re already very isolated, they’re already very sanctioned. It’s not about introducing new sanctions or dissuading companies from working with these states, because they already aren’t. It’s about reframing the discussion. Those sanctions are issued for nuclear proliferation, for WMDs, for ballistic missiles, for terrorism; they are not issued for human rights violations, and they’re definitely not issued for gender apartheid. So we want to start to reframe why it is that we’re saying that governments should not engage with these governments [so] they need to change their behavior. It makes it unacceptable.
The crime of apartheid as distinct to the crime of gender persecution, gender apartheid would introduce more of a question about third party actors. Because of the historical example of South Africa apartheid, there’s a question of liability. If governments and companies are complicit, or doing business with regimes that are perpetrating gender apartheid, are they willingly aiding and abetting this regime? It’s a bit more expansive than what’s currently on the books, in our view.
We’re not asking for increased sanctions as part of this campaign. What we’re asking for is that there clearly are demands that gender apartheid come to an end.
For more information, you can read the letter in its entirety, and join in signing it, at endgenderapartheid.today.
You Should Give a Sh*t About is an ongoing column highlighting local stories with a global impact. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
[post_title] => You Should Give a Sh*t About: Gender Apartheid
[post_excerpt] => Under international criminal law, apartheid only applies to discrimination based on race. A new open letter argues it should apply to gender discrimination, too.
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Nearly seven months later, a case for why some healthcare providers in Nigeria are getting nervous.
Rose sits in the waiting room of a Planned Parenthood clinic in Isolo, Lagos, waiting to receive her prescription for oral contraceptives. While her husband supports her decision, her family does not, and she is here despite their insistence on her having more children before trying them, believing that they can take away her fertility. That she’s even able to get these contraceptives would have been unthinkable just a few years ago: Rose has never heard about Roe v. Wade, but she remembers when it was impossible to consider family planning at all, let alone have access to it, and fears returning to those times.
Before organizations like Planned Parenthood Federation Nigeria (PPFN), sexual and reproductive agency were impossible for most women in the country. “Many women who visit Planned Parenthood defy their husbands to get contraceptives, secretly making choices that save their lives despite facing consequences if they are ever found out,” says Zainab Mukhtar, Communications Officer for PPFN. "We advocate method by choice and exercising free will, not only for married women but sexual and reproductive health choices for young people."
In Nigeria, many women cannot access reproductive health services without spousal permission, and if unmarried, they are shunned for considering it. Even health workers cite God's omniscience when refusing care: While trying to obtain birth control, one unmarried woman recalls her male doctor condescendingly telling her, "Ah, madam, do you want to test God? Where is your husband? Go and bring [him]." This provider bias, where health workers lead with disapproval when consulted for reproductive and sexual health care, has only made it harder for many women in Nigeria to access the care they need—a bias that becomes far more severe when it comes to abortion.
This bias is likely to only get worse: Sani Mohammed, a sociologist, activist, and the executive director of the Bridge Connect Africa Initiative, says the repeal of Roe v. Wade last summer has had ripple effects beyond the U.S., and creates justification for more limits on women's rights worldwide, often detering advocacy efforts and slowing momentum behind progressive bills. “It sends a signal to anti-abortion advocates in Nigeria that if the U.S. can do it, why not us?” Mohammed says. “It will take longer for Nigeria to make abortion services open and legal because it sets a precedent and justification, rescinding all the work done today and making it harder to make a case in favor of sexual and reproductive rights.”
Sani was careful in choosing his words, so as not to risk the little progress made, adding that it took a long time to even get this far. Bridge Connect Africa Initiative focuses on women’s rights and reproductive health rights, pushing for policies and campaigns around gender-based violence, and access to education for young girls to help inspire more informed social and reproductive health choices, especially in northern Nigeria. But it’s been an uphill battle.
Except in situations where having the child puts the mother's life at risk, Nigeria is governed by two laws that criminalize abortion: the penal code in the north and the criminal code in the south. When discussing restrictive sexual and reproductive laws in Nigeria, people often think of the north, associating it with Sharia law and terrorism, but southern Nigeria is predominantly Christian, comprising of Catholics and evangelical Christians, and their stance toward abortion and sexual reproductive rights is similar to hardliners in America. In Enugu State, in southeastern Nigeria, for example, a coalition of civil society organizations claimed that the comprehensive sexuality education (CSE) in the public school curriculum equates to pornography and demanded to stop sex education in schools.
While abortion is a crime in Nigeria, it is also a cause of shame to be pregnant out of wedlock, regardless of the circumstances of the pregnancy. In northern Nigerian culture, a girl is considered old enough to be married and have children at 11 years old, but an 11-year-old girl is not allowed to seek out family planning methods. Young girls who get pregnant from rape still have to carry it to term, and to avoid scorn and ostracism, often find unsafe means to hide their shame. Without legal recourse, these girls either neglect the children after they are born or resort to unsafe abortions, regardless of the risks. Sani recalls witnessing two cases of hysterectomies performed on 14-year-old girls. "It is already difficult to have access to safe abortion, and other reproductive health devices that help girls as young as 12 to 14 stay safe and live healthy lives."
According to a report by the Population Reference Bureau (PRB), about two million women and girls aged 15 to 45 have abortions in Nigeria every year—a staggeringly high number over three times the estimated number of abortions in the U.S. Of these women and girls, 6,000 die, and 500,000 live with complications from unsafe abortions, despite some doctors risking their licenses to provide off-record/off-book abortion care. It is also the fourth leading cause of death for lower and middle income women, according to the Academy for Health Development (AHEAD), a not-for-profit health research agency in Nigeria.
Organizations like PPFN—which is a member of the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF)—are doing their best to combat this, but similar to America, misconceptions about their services abound. Like in the U.S., the majority of Planned Parenthood Nigeria’s services are preventive, especially against HIV/AIDS, cervical cancer, and malaria. They provide maternal and child care through malaria prevention and treatments, especially intermittent preventive treatment (IPT) for pregnancy malaria, which is a critical public health problem in Nigeria. Also like in the U.S., PPFN provides post-abortion care for women and girls having spontaneous abortions or miscarriages, and those who attempt incomplete abortions using crude objects to remove an unwanted pregnancy “by any means necessary.” Sometimes these objects are found still inside the women.
Would PPFN provide abortions in uncomplicated cases? Zainab, with a careful laugh, says they would, but that it’s “tricky.” They are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. If they don’t help, the patient could seek an unsafe abortion elsewhere that could lead to death; if they do, it could mean breaking the law. Nevertheless, PPFN will not turn away a patient in need, and will perform abortion services within legal exceptions—that is, when the birth of the child directly puts the life of the mother in mortal danger.
Perhaps if Nigerians were more open about abortion, it could inspire a legislative debate similar to the one in Ireland, and allow a platform to discuss the benefits of legalizing abortion, providing safer choices for women and girls through government funding and training for health care providers. But with the Nigerian health sector being one of the most underfunded in the world, it does not leave much hope.
While Zainab believes it is too early to say what the real effects of the overturning of Roe v. Wade will be on Africa, she predicts the heightening of fear and possibilities of regression. “It is difficult to work in this field in Nigeria; these things happening here have existed a long time but signaling from the U.S. can make things worse.” Shortly after the repeal of Roe v. Wade, the Lagos Government proposed new abortion guidelines on the safe termination of pregnancy. They were quickly rejected after the governor, Babajide Sanwo Olu, who is running for re-election, received backlash from Christian and Muslim religious organizations in the state.
But even before the overturning of Roe v. Wade, it’s been an especially difficult time. For more than 50 years, the United States has supported global family planning and reproductive health rights in Nigeria, but when countries like America, which have historically provided aid, start taking them away in their own countries, the idea of choice for women in oppressive societies is erased forever. Most notably, the global gag rule on abortion during the Trump years reduced reproductive health funding and setback the work being done independently on sexual health rights both locally and abroad.
There is progress, however, no matter how slow. Planned Parenthood Nigeria has a more comprehensive curriculum for sexual and reproductive health rights (SRHR) education currently being piloted in private schools, where there is less national control of the curriculum. They also train health workers on sexual and reproductive health rights and how to identify provider bias. Bridge Connect Initiative has been able to get three northern states (Kano, Jigawa, and Bauchi) to recognize the Violence Against Person Prohibition Act (VAPP) and the child protection bill. They also provide psychosocial support to child brides and survivors of gender-based violence while helping many girls complete their education.
The durability of these successes lies in the allyship of progressive nations towards women’s health abroad. This is why the rescinding of Roe v. Wade is so dangerous on a global scale. Women are dying now. Nigerian women are deprived of contraception when they want it or forced by their husbands to take it when they don’t, and even that is considered progressive. What becomes the fate of a woman living in Nigeria when the government takes a more hardline stance on her agency without a powerful ally to help? With the right support from local organizations and international health rights networks, and a renewed interest in Africa from the U.S., hopefully, we never have to find out.
[post_title] => The Overturning of Roe v. Wade Didn't Just Affect America
[post_excerpt] => Nearly seven months later, a case for why some healthcare providers in Nigeria are getting nervous.
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Ajo, a traditional microsavings system based on trust, allowed women in the informal economy to survive the pandemic lockdown.
The outdoor markets of Lagos are a noisy clutter of shops and makeshift stalls. The traders are mostly women who call out their wares loudly, with customers clustering in front of the stalls to haggle while the business owner multitasks and chats with them all. The stall owners are friendly but competitive, bantering with one another all day.
In this familiar chaos, the women form sisterhoods and support systems. One of these systems is called “ajo” (or “esusu” in eastern Nigeria). It is an ancient informal cooperative savings culture passed down for generations, with the women contributing a portion of their earnings on a weekly or monthly basis and each receiving the full amount, in turn, to invest in her business.
This is a typical example of how an ajo works:
In a 12-unit rotation for 12,000 naira ($29.01) monthly, each member contributes 1,000 naira ($2.42) per month, choosing a number or month when they would like to receive their due. They give their money to a thrift collector, who is responsible for disbursing the collected money at the end of each agreed-upon period, and for keeping the women’s savings. At the end of the rotation, a member can cancel her contribution or start again. But a unit of 12 does not mean 12 people. It could also mean 12 “hands,” or contributions. Some members might decide to contribute two hands, or double the amount (2,000 naira), to collect double (24,000 naira).
The foundational principles of ajo are trust, familiarity, and an uninterrupted cycle of donation. These might not seem like concrete measures for financial security, but they are remarkably successful—most of the time. The restrictions and privations of the Covid-19 pandemic interrupted this usually reliable traditional micro-savings system. Women make up half of Nigeria’s informal labor force, which is unregulated and often exploited. Whether they are traders, farmers, or domestic workers, these women are often the family’s secret breadwinners (in this conservative patriarchal culture, the man must always be seen as the financial head of the family). The pandemic lockdowns, with income drastically cut due to restrictions that for several months kept market hours reduced to four from the usual 60 per week, made ajo more important than ever.
Surviving the pandemic, despite the prevalence of disinformation
In December 2021 I visited Addo market in Lagos to speak with some of these women. Ify, a single mother in her mid-thirties who sells dried fish, told me she panicked when the government announced a lockdown in March 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic. For several months hardly any customers visited the market; the few who came to shop were limited to one at a time. According to the women, if stallholders neglected to wear masks, the police forced them to buy one from them at exorbitant prices, or even kicked them out of the market. I could not independently verify this, but have no reason to doubt the women given the Nigerian police's well-documented corruption. To save on the expense of buying a new disposable mask to wear each day, Ify bought a reusable face shield.
Ify said she was not worried about catching the virus. She gets her information on COVID-19 from mainstream news outlets, but her opinions reflect the disinformation that circulates on social media. She said that one woman in the area died after she was vaccinated, although she acknowledged never having met her. Ify said she never met anyone who had caught the virus, nor did she believe she would catch it, which is why she did not plan to be vaccinated. She asked why the government was mandating vaccines when they had not done the same for HIV tests or antiretrovirals.
The government is, in fact, not mandating vaccines. As in other countries, vaccine passports are required to enter certain public spaces and in order to travel.
Ronke, a 21-year-old college student who helps at her mother’s vegetable stall during semester breaks, could only sell fresh produce to neighbors for their meals during the lockdown. “I saw no dead bodies or sick people in Nigeria even on social media, me and my family believe COVID-19 is fake and we will not be taking the vaccine,” she said.
Nigeria’s first phase of the vaccine rollout was in March–April 2021; it was limited to essential workers and the elderly, which excluded most of the women who work at the market. Before the lockdown, these women, some of whom have little or no formal education, received health information from the local radio, community workers, and primary healthcare centers. But the pandemic exposed them to unverified sources and misinformation on WhatsApp and Facebook.
Family and friends innocently share viral messages via WhatSapp groups; the messages, in pidgin English and various local languages, recommend homemade cures for the virus, like herbal steaming. Or they contain disinformation, like the claim that Covid vaccines inject magnetic chips into the body. According to this conspiracy theory, the chips attract metals, like spoons, which stick to the skin. According to another conspiracy theory the virus is fake and the pandemic restrictions are just another government ploy to steal public funds. Since people receive these messages from those they trust, like their faith leaders or educated members of their families, they believe they are credible.
How COVID affected the ajo system
Because they made so little money during the lockdowns and were struggling to feed their families on their reduced earnings, neither Ify nor Ronke could keep up their ajo contributions, nor could many other women in their groups. With contributions reduced by 70 percent, their ajo unit could not stay afloat. Contributions stopped, pending the lifting of the lockdown and the full re-opening of the markets. Ronke refers to the semblance of normalcy that followed the 2020 lockdown as the “end of Corona,” a sentiment shared by most women in the market. If they may trade, then “corona” must be over, they say, associating the virus with the period of restrictions and nothing more. These women go about their business without face masks or social distancing. The police no longer compel them to abide by any pandemic restrictions.
A study of the impact of COVID-19 on women’s savings groups carried out by a collaboration of think tanks and researchers, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Africa Center for Systematic Reviews, and Makerere University, found that households with women who are in informal savings groups were less likely to experience food insecurity and more likely to have savings, which was critical in getting through the pandemic. Women’s savings groups showed more potential for resilience and provided women with a platform for leadership and community responsiveness.
Ajo, however, still carries risk. The women in Addo market lost their savings during the pandemic lockdown to a thrift collector who suddenly “disappeared with everything.” In case of death or serious illnesses, no one is liable for the loss. Sometimes, bad loans accumulate from members who misappropriate funds. That is why researchers recommend that financial institutions and governments offer further support for ajo.
Beatrice Joseph is a thrift collector and restaurateur in Yola, Adamawa State, in northeast Nigeria, an area that has been plagued by terrorists and bandits. She manages the contributions of women across five markets in the state, engaging them in financial literacy training, bookkeeping, and loan repayment. During the lockdown, Beatrice lost all her investments when her restaurant was vandalized. She managed to keep her business and that of her members thanks to a partnership with Riby, a digital financial services (DFS) platform that supports financial cooperatives and trade groups in Nigeria. These services act as the central collector while simplifying the banking process by accepting social credit as collateral (the group stands as guarantor), using USSD codes and text messages instead of complicated apps, and securing their savings. This reduces the risk associated with ajo, while providing financial independence for the women by converting their savings to investments.
Ekundayo Kiyesi, general manager of Riby, describes the thrift collector as an individual microfinance bank that provides accountability, accessibility, and security to the ajo for a monthly service charge that is commonly around 25 cents. Platforms like Riby are formalizing the ajo system for larger collectives in markets and cottage industries like the unit Beatrice manages, but among smaller, homogenous groups some believe ajo should remain communal and independent.
Joy Ehonwa, a freelance writer and book editor in Lagos who runs a small ajo group for employed middle-class women, is one of them. Joy created a system of accountability for her group, a record and digitization process that involves registering a next of kin—which, she laughingly assured me, she had never had a reason to use.
Financial insecurity is just as much of an issue for women working in formal business employment, as it is for those whose income is derived from the informal economy. According to the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), approximately half the Nigerian working population earns less than 700 naira ($1.70) per day, even in formal employment; in cases where income is determined by gender (e.g. in the case of office assistants), women earn even less. With such low income and no collateral, they can neither save money nor afford to take a loan. This is where ajo comes in; it is a saving and interest-free loan system that they can depend on.
Nigerian women have more financial agency today than ever before, but societal and cultural norms are still very conservative. Husbands thus control the family finances due to the widely held belief that a man whose wife is financially independent is emasculated. A lack of education, religious and gender bias, and low trust in financial service providers are also reasons for financial dependence. But when women are empowered to earn and invest, they drive innovation, invest in health and child development and increase productivity and economic growth. The economic strength of a country is directly proportional to the economic strength of its women. Despite the digitization of ajo, it will remain a fluid system driven by community, trust and independence. With some financial education, Nigeria’s hardworking, innovative women will save their country’s declining economy.
[post_title] => How a traditional microsavings system enabled Nigerian women to save their businesses during the pandemic
[post_excerpt] => Ajo, a traditional microsavings system based on trust, allowed women in the informal economy to survive the pandemic lockdown.
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[post_content] => LGBT groups across the Middle East and North Africa rely on social media for networking, information, and empowerment. Now police are exploiting the platforms to arrest & detain them, often destroying their lives. Sarah Hegazy, an Egyptian queer feminist, raised a rainbow flag at a concert in Cairo. Rania Amdouni, a Tunisian queer activist, protested deteriorating economic conditions and police brutality in Tunis. Mohamad al-Bokari, a Yemeni blogger in Saudi Arabia, declared he supported equal rights for all, including LGBT people.
The common thread in these cases is that all three were identified in social media posts, which allowed their governments to monitor their online activity and target them offline. What happened afterward ruined their lives.
In Sarah Hegazy’s now infamous photo she is hoisted on a friend’s shoulders, smiling elatedly as she waves a rainbow flag at a 2017 performance in Cairo by Mashrou’ Leila, the popular Lebanese band whose lead singer is openly gay. The photo was posted on Facebook and shared countless times, garnering thousands of hateful comments and supportive counter-messages in what became a frenzied digital debate.
Days later, the Egyptian government initiated a crackdown. Police arrested Hegazy on charges of “joining a banned group aimed at interfering with the constitution,” along with Ahmed Alaa, who also raised the flag, and then dozens of other concertgoers. In what became a massive campaign of arrests against hundreds of people perceived as gay or transgender, Egyptian authorities created fake profiles on same-sex dating applications to entrap LGBT people, reviewed online video footage of the concert, then proceeded to round up people on the street based on their appearance.
Hegazy spoke about her post-traumatic stress after she was released on bail. She had been jailed for three months of pretrial detention, during which police tortured her with electric shocks and solitary confinement. They also incited other detainees to sexually assault and verbally abuse her. Fearing re-arrest and a prison sentence, she went into exile in Toronto, where, on June 14, 2020, she took her own life. The 30-year-old woman ended her short farewell note with the words: “To the world, you’ve been greatly cruel, but I forgive.”
Rania Amdouni was on the front line during the country-wide demonstrations in Tunisia that began in January 2021, protesting economic decline and rampant police violence. People who identified themselves as police officers took her photo at a protest, posted it on Facebook, and captioned it with her contact information and derogatory comments based on her gender expression.
Soon after, her profile was flooded with death threats, insults—including from a parliament member—and messages inciting violence against her. When police harassment extended to the street—outside restaurants she frequented and near her residence—she tried to file a complaint. At the police station, officers refused to register her complaint, then arrested her for shouting.
Tunisian security forces also targeted other LGBT activists at the protests with arrests, threats to rape and kill, and physical assault. LGBT people were smeared on social media and “outed”—their identities and personal information exposed without their consent. The offline consequences were catastrophic—people lost their jobs, were expelled from their homes, and even fled the country.
Amdouni was sentenced to six months in prison and a fine. Though released upon appeal, she reported suffering acute anxiety and depression as well as continued harassment online and in the street.
Mohamed al-Bokari traveled on foot from Yemen to Saudi Arabia after armed groups threatened to kill him due to his online activism and gender non-conformity. While living in Riyadh as an undocumented migrant, he posted a video on Twitter declaring his support for LGBT rights; this prompted homophobic outrage from the Saudi authorities and the public. Subsequently, security forces arrested him.
He was charged with promoting homosexuality online and “imitating women,” sentenced to 10 months in prison, and faced deportation to Yemen upon release. Security officers held him in solitary confinement for weeks, subjected him to a forced anal exam, and repeatedly beat him to compel him to “confess that he is gay.” Al-Bokari is now safely resettled, with outside help, but remains isolated from his community and cannot safely return home.
Across the Middle East and North Africa region, LGBT people and groups advocating for LGBT rights have relied on digital platforms for empowerment, access to information, movement building, and networking. In contexts in which governments prohibit LGBT groups from operating, activist organizing happens mainly online, to expose anti-LGBT violence and discrimination. In some cases, digital advocacy has contributed to reversing injustices against LGBT individuals. But governments have been paying attention, and they have a crucial advantage—the law is on their side.
Most countries in the region have laws that criminalize same-sex relations. Even in the countries that do not—Egypt, ironically, is one of them—spurious “morality laws,” debauchery and prostitution laws are weaponized to target LGBT people.
When I was documenting the systematic torture of LGBT people in Egypt’s prisons, the targeting pattern was unmistakable: Egyptian authorities relied on digital evidence to track down, arrest, and prosecute LGBT people. People who had been detained told me that police officers, unable to find “evidence” when searching their phones at the time of arrest, downloaded same-sex dating apps on their phones and uploaded pornographic photos to justify keeping them in detention. The cases I documented suggest a policy coordinated by the Egyptian government online and offline, to persecute LGBT people. One police officer told a man I interviewed that his entrapment and arrest were part of an operation to “clean the streets of faggots.”
In recent years, government digital surveillance has gained traction as a method to quell free expression and silence opponents. Concurrently, the application of anti-LGBT laws has extended to online spaces—regardless of whether same-sex acts occur—chilling even the digital discussion of LGBT issues.
The consequences of digital surveillance and online discrimination spiked for LGBT people just as the Covid-19 pandemic and related lockdown measures closed down groups that had offered safe refuge, diminished existing communal safety nets, threatened already dire employment and health access, and forced individuals to endure often abusive environments.
In Morocco, a campaign of “outing” emerged in April 2020, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. Ordinary citizens created fake accounts on same-sex dating apps and endangered users by circulating their private information, alarming vulnerable groups. LGBT people, expelled from their homes by their families during a country-wide lockdown, had nowhere to go.
Activist organizations in the region play a significant role in navigating these threats and responding to LGBT people’s needs, regularly calling upon digital platforms to remove content that incites violence and to protect users. Yet in most of the region, these organizations are also hobbled by intimidation and government interference.
In Lebanon, for example, a gender and sexuality conference, held annually since 2013, had to be moved abroad in 2019 after a religious group on Facebook called for the organizers’ arrest and the cancellation of the conference for “inciting immorality.” General Security Forces shut down the 2018 conference and indefinitely denied non-Lebanese LGBT activists who attended the conference permission to re-enter the country. The crackdown signaled the shrinking space for LGBT activism in a country which used to be known as a port in a storm for human rights defenders from the Arabic-speaking world.
These are not isolated incidents in each country. When state-led, they often reflect government strategies to digitalize attacks against LGBT people and justify their persecution, especially under the pretext of responding to ongoing crises. It is no coincidence that oppressive governments in varied contexts across the region are threatened by online activism — because it works.
Exposing these abusive patterns highlights the urgency of decriminalizing same-sex relations and gender variance in the region. Instead of criminalizing the existence of LGBT people and targeting them online, governments should safeguard them from digital attacks and subsequent threats to their basic rights, livelihoods, and bodily autonomy.
Meanwhile, digital platforms have a responsibility to prevent online spaces from becoming a realm for state-sponsored repression. Corporations that produce these technologies need to engage meaningfully with LGBT people in the development of policies and features, including by employing them as engineers and in their policy teams, from design to implementation.
[post_title] => ‘Clean the streets of faggots’: Governments in the Middle East & North Africa target LGBT people via social media
[post_excerpt] => Most Middle Eastern countries have laws that criminalize same-sex relations. In cases where they do not, police weaponize spurious 'morality' laws to target LGBT people.
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[post_content] => This is the first instance of a transcontinental application to the ICJ based on violations of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide
The Gambia, a majority-Muslim West African nation, and the smallest country on mainland Africa, took an enormous step this Monday on behalf of their fellow Muslims, the Rohingya people, when it filed a lawsuit against Myanmar for the crime of genocide — the destruction in whole or in part, of a national, ethnical, racial or religious group — at the International Court of Justice (ICJ).
The Rohingya are a Muslim ethnic minority in majority-Buddhist Myanmar who are concentrated in Rakhine state, which borders Bangladesh. They have lived in Myanmar for generations, but the Rohingya have always been treated like outsiders and systematically discriminated against by the government. In August 2017, following small-scale attacks by Rohingya militants against Myanmar police posts, Myanmar security forces responded with widespread, indiscriminate murders and gang-rapes, as well as the burning of entire villages. Thousands of Rohingya were killed, and an estimated 745,000 Rohingya fled as refugees to neighboring Bangladesh, including 400,000 children.
They joined around 200,000 Rohingya refugees already living in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, which is now home to the world’s largest refugee camp. Over 900,000 stateless, deeply traumatized Rohingya are living in precarious shelters, vulnerable to monsoons and dependent on humanitarian aid.
Witnesses to the genocide tell horrifying stories. Reuters reported that on September 2, 2017, 10 Rohingya men were bound together while Buddhist villagers dug a shallow grave, before hacking to death two of the men and shooting the rest:
“One grave for 10 people,” said Soe Chay, 55, a retired soldier from Inn Din’s Rakhine Buddhist community who said he helped dig the pit and saw the killings. The soldiers shot each man two or three times, he said. “When they were being buried, some were still making noises. Others were already dead.”
Myanmar describes its actions as a “clearance operation." It jailed and then ultimately released two of the Reuters journalists who investigated the story, and continues to deny vehemently that it committed genocide.
The United Nations independent fact-finding mission issued a report last year, which named senior generals of the Myanmar military who they recommended be investigated and prosecuted in an international criminal tribunal for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. The mission further found that the Rohingya who remain in Myanmar are at risk of further genocidal violence, and that repatriation has been practically impossible.
The case is unprecedented for a number of reasons. The Gambia is located over 7,000 miles from Myanmar — this is the first instance of a transcontinental application to the ICJ based on violations of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide of December 9, 1948, to which both Myanmar and The Gambia are signatories.
The Gambia’s lawsuit is supported by the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, which calls itself the “collective voice of the Islamic world,” and represents 57 member states, including Bangladesh, which has borne the brunt of the Rohingya refugee crisis.
The Gambia is seeking an injunction to prevent Myanmar from inflicting further violence upon the Rohingya population, and accountability for atrocities already committed. Prosecution of war crimes and crimes against humanity normally falls under the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court (ICC), but Myanmar is not a signatory to the Rome Statute and so no charges have been filed.
At a time when wealthy nations are increasingly turning their backs on enforcing human rights law, it’s heartening to see smaller nations (with access to deep pockets) holding power to account at the Hague. Gambia’s efforts on behalf of the Rohingya began after its attorney general and justice minister, Abubacarr Tambadou, read the UN report on the atrocities, and flew to Bangladesh to meet refugees and hear their stories.
Tambadou, who worked for years as a lawyer at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), told the Washington Post: “As I listened to the horrific stories — of killings, of rape, of torture, of burning people alive in their homes — it brought back memories of the Rwandan genocide. The world failed to help in 1994, and the world is failing to protect vulnerable people 25 years later.” The Gambia recently began hearings for its own Truth, Reconciliation and Reparations Commission to address human rights abuses committed by former dictator Yahya Jammeh.
[post_title] => The Gambia has filed a case of genocide at The Hague against Myanmar, on behalf of the Rohingya
[post_excerpt] => The case is unprecedented for a number of reasons.
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