Justice for Uwa: Why I will not apologize. 2

However, importing of foreign laws would be as ineffectual as trying extinguish dragon fire by singing to it. Let me remind you, a system is only as effective as the personnel administering it.

While these would have been the case in a purely Islamic state, it is no news that there are no existing  Islamic state anywhere in the world. Do we have Muslim-run states? Yeah. Are they Islamic states run by pure Islamic legal cannons? Nope. Anybody who says otherwise is either an ignorant fool or a compulsive liar in need of comprehensive mental health rehabilitation. 


When we discuss meting out the most commensurate punishments to perps of these dastardly acts, we need to open up to reality and see to how our Justice system can be strengthened and priorities are set right. We need to enact stricter laws, our law enforcement apparatus be redesigned to fight crimes and not aid it. We also need to shift concentration to responsible parenting, proactive sex education, re-assessment of social norms, religious and cultural values. Also trite to understand is that girls will only be what society teaches them to be and boys will not be only what society teaches them not to be. Yeah, that seems tough but it is what it is. 


Now our journey is almost over, but before that lets put to death some outright ridiculous stances that have been circulating the internet lately on this particular rape issue. Among them chiefly is the:

“I am a man and I am ashamed of myself and my gender. I accept responsibility for this bla bla...”.

This is just an absurd and ludicrous statement because it seeks to undermine the entire essence of this struggle. The essence of this struggle is to create safe spaces for the female gender and ensure upward mobility to enjoy similar protection as male privilege offers.

 Yeah, this is acknowledging that in matters of security, there is such thing as male privilege. This is not to say there aren’t other aspects of the society where males are unprivileged and feminine privileges hold sway but that is not the essence of this discussion. You see, that italicized statement above reeks of idiotic admittance of guilt by the entire gender. It lumps both groups of perps and those who seek to reform the society in one ewa-agonyi mix. And before you raise a deadbeat argument to counter this, let me remind you of the words of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie when asked on her book, Half Of A Yellow Sun what she thinks about Olanna sleeping with Richard, her sister’s fiancé while her sister was away say about the Nigerian woman, she said: “I don’t think the actions of Olanna should be representative of the character of the entire female gender. What Olanna did is purely representative of Olanna’s character only...” .

I mean, why will you call yourself an intelligent adult and voluntarily accept blame for a felony you didn’t commit? If it’s not jazz then it shows you are of very weak mental strength, you are feeble in the face of the slightest notion of intimidation, can be cowed into silence and be subject to confess to crimes you didn’t commit. It means you cannot protect yourself and definitely are incapable of creating safe spaces for anybody else. You see for yourself now how self-defeating that stance is?

Another stance which is quite erroneous is the “all men are rapists” rant. This seeks to entrench that the entire reason rape occurs is Men. Not rapists, not rape-apologists, not rape-enablers, just men. And going further in antagonism, refer to all men who are outraged with the banal generalization of this statement as rape apologists and/or potential rapists.

That is an assessment bereft of sense because while emotions are running high, it simply doesn’t excuse you from the use of your reasoning faculties. You do not accuse innocent people of heinous crimes and expect them to just ‘man’ it up, because that in itself is very much a leaking bucket to the efforts of curbing rape. We all have seen in recent times how normalized the culture of rape is in an average Nigerian community, from people ‘jokingly’ admitting that if their bosses rape them and pay them a certain fee, they can as well do whatever they want with their bodies, to some quite ludicrously saying there is a massive difference between “Stop jorr’’ and “STOP’’ and thus effectively neutralising  the effort of our NO means NO concept,  a fundamental element in eliminating the culture of rape.


You can see for yourself, how long a way there is to go. And of course, people who say this are mostly not men. It is evidently a logically obtuse to lump the evils of a minority on the larger majority because entire identities should not be conflated with criminal stereotypes. There are as much women rape apologists as men, and many more rape enablers as women.


And thus, I am not sorry. I am not sorry for being a man. I am not sorry for my gender. Maybe being a man gives certain privileges in certain circumstances? Yeah. But that’s equally applicable to being a woman.

Its indisputable that being a man gives you certain privileges in certain circumstances. Would I enjoy the privileges it affords me? Damn right. Would I be put to shame for them? Absolutely not.


The pragmatic way forward is to use those privileges to protect women in places where they are exposed to the elements by creating safe spaces and that’s a freeway solution to healing society. Now whether a woman would do the same for a man is taking another highway to another discussion entirely. We would be taking about why a man would take help from a woman after all, “isn’t he the man?”. We would talk about fragile egos and toxic masculinity, feminism and all sorts of ‘trendish’ arguments.

And here is where that equity we have always talked about comes in. But can we walk the talk?


So yeah, this is me saying with my chest my two cents on the matter. Like I said you don’t have to agree with it and if you do, you’re welcome.