Sex Strike Brings Peace to Communal Violence

A group of women in a violence plagued area of the Philppines came up with their own weapon to end the fighting – a sex strike.

They withheld sex from their husbands until they promised to quit fignhting. Their stand helped end clashes in July between villages in rural Mindanao Island. Women from one of the villages came up with the idea of a sex strike as a way to help rebuild their village and bring peace.

Many of them were fed up with not being able to deliver their products due to the violence that closed down a main road between the villages. The women wanted their husbands to end the fightings and by using their feminine wiles they succeeded in enforcing their wish.

The idea of holding sex for a cause is not a new one, the ancient Greek play Lysistrata tells the story of women who organised a sex strike to end a war between Athens and Sparta.

More recently, a strike was launched in 2006 in the Colmbian city of Pereira, known for its drug trafficking and violent crimes. The strike was implemented by wives and girlfriends of gang members to get them to change their life style and hand over their guns.

A similiar campaign was carried out by women in Kenya in 2009 to protest the growing divide in Kenya’s coalition government.

Source: Daily Sun   Tuesday, September 20, 2011 Pg 15

SIX MONTHS PREGNACY LOST AFTER BRUTAL BEATING BY NAVAL RATINGS

The brutal beating of Mrs. Obase Mordi and her brother by naval ratings as reported in the Punch Newspaper on Monday 5 September 2011 is nothing to be written home about. All because, the lady sought to trace the address of a naval officer’s wife that mistakenly took her luggage in a transit bus.  The lady and her brother were beaten black and blue in their attempt to locate the navy offcer’s wife’s quarters through the navy officers stationed at the entrance to the navy barracks in Calabar despite the fact that the lady informed the officers that she was pregnant.

Although the lady never said she said anything nasty to the man at the gate in her frustrated attempt to get her missing luggage. According to the newspaper report, the first officer, Mrs Mordi met at the gate was very polite but the officer beside him was very rude and refused to help as regard tracing the naval officer’s wife with her luggage. Mrs. Mordi said as she approached another officer coming towards the gate to help with locating her missing luggage, the uncooperative naval officer, Bassey by name bounced on her. As Mrs. Mordi’s brother held the naval officer’s wrist, begging him to stop beating the sister because she was pregnant, naval officer, left the sister and started beating the brother mercilessly despite the fact that he was informed that the man is sickle cell patient. Officers at the entrance to the barracks joined Bassey in beating the duo, after which they were handcuffed and taken to a nearby police station to be locked inside the cell.

Even if Mrs. Mordi had snapped at Bassey, the barbaric treatment of the lady and her brother were not at all commensurate to whatever she could have said to the officer.

I wonder what happened to the case of the naval senior officer who shut a gun at an Okada man (a LASU undergraduate who does the Okada business to sponsor himself at school) because he hit his car with his Okada.

I hope the huge amount of money awarded by the court as damages in favour of the lady that was brutalised by a naval officer sometime last year was actually obtained from the officer.

Am racking my brain to think of what other detering action should be taken against men in the Nigerian force who think because they are enlisted in the force they are more superior to non uniformed men which made up a larger part of the country they took an oath of office to protect.

Worse to be imagined are those officers that take delight at dehumanising women. I wonder if those officers really had mothers and not that they dropped from the sky. Don’t they have wives and children – daughters at home. Am told an average officer in the lower rank in the Nigerian force get new wives at every town, village and city he is posted. At every new post, he forgets the wife and children he left behind, preparing to get another wife and of cause breed more children at the new place, he is posted. This makes him vulnerable to impregnating his own daughter in the course of changing women at every new town he is posted to.

Should the careless life he lives be made to endanger the lives of citizens for which he is paid to protect? No!

I think the Nigerian forcemen should be particularly trained to handle with civilian women (especially non offenders) with utmost respect and dignity.

Female officers should also be stationed at entrances to barracks just like their male counterparts to attend to female visitors to the barracks.

If a female naval officer was present at the scene of the event, she would most probably have saved the situation.

Am sincerely disappointed at the response of the Public Relation Officer of the State Naval Command, Lt. Cmdr. Way Olabisi, who said he expected Mrs Mordi to have reported the incident straight away to a nearby naval office. How could the poor lady be convinced that she would not received a similar treatment (if not worse), from any other naval office she goes to report the incident? The incident must have made her devastated, timid and so confused that going straight away to a nearby naval office would not have appeared a safe thing to do.

Bassey and the other naval officers maltreated Mrs Mordi and her brother, should be brought to book. A commensurate purnishment (such as losing their jobs) should be meted out to them. 

The Overt Act

The Nigerian society is a patriarchal society where the male dominates. In the Nigerian society is a hierarchy in which men’s activities and attributes that are more highly valued such that men are given a greater leverage over decision making and resources than women. This is more so even when the women are more hardworking. The sharp contrast between the experiences of widows and widowers in Nigeria vividly illustrates this phenomenon. Widowers in most cultures in Nigeria rarely go through obnoxious widowhood practices like their female counterparts. They are not put in confinements like the widows. In fact some widowers are given women to sleep with on the day their deceased wife is buried in order not to feel lonely.
What is most striking and surprising about these cultures is that it is mostly enforced by women against their female folks. I have heard cases in which when women lost their husbands, it is their female in laws that spear head the fight against the widow in the name of tradition. They feel when the deceased man was alive, it was the widow that did not allow the man to extend his generous hands to them as much as they had wanted. Now that the man is dead, field is free to revenge on the widow. In extreme cases, they accuse the widow of being responsible for the death of her husband even where the man died of a disease he contacted before meeting the woman.
Deji of Akure’s olori provoked the Oba and his aide’s voyage to his estranged wife’s family’s house to dehumanized the woman forgetting that it is the cane used on the first wife that is kept for the junior wife.
I wonder what on earth the estranged wife could have done to have warrant such a bastardly act from the Oba who forgot momentarily his sacred position in the community.
I think we, women inspite of the innate power of persuasion God has bestowed on us over men, should work on our emotions and fantasies. Women networks should not only include women from all social strata but men as well. The man needs to know that it is not all yellings from a woman that requires an overly act.
Oba Oluwadare Adepoju Adesina’s action is almost causing him his throne. What legacy is the monarch leaving behind for his generations to come? What a shame!