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In July 2003, the African Union (AU), an international bloc that Nigeria is a member of, adopted the Maputo Protocol during a summit in Mozambique.
The Protocol is a legal framework to address the challenges women face on the African continent, including gender-based discrimination. It ensures women’s rights to dignity, life, and integrity.
As culled from Equality Now, the Maputo Protocol is beneficial to Nigerian women because it;
- Mandates state actors to take appropriate institutional actions in addressing gender biases that promote inequality against women and girls.
- Promotes women and girls’ human rights. It tasks public institutions to protect them from violence and prohibit acts that exploit or degrade them.
- Guarantees girls’ and women’s rights to life, integrity, and security. It mandates public institutions to prohibit all forms of exploitation, cruel, inhuman, or degrading punishment and treatment.
As of September 19, 2023, Nigeria, like 48 other countries out of 55, ratified the treaty to reinforce its commitment to upholding gender equality and combating all forms of discrimination against women.
As part of DUBAWA’s Media and Information Literacy (MIL) project, we wrote this article to explore the agreement’s implications on gender dynamics in Nigeria.
Nothing to write home about
Notably, this is not the first time Nigeria has participated in such agreements on gender equality. The country has developed several national gender policies, an important milestone being the passage of the Violence Against Persons Prohibition (VAPP) Act.
Meanwhile, 22 years later, Africa’s largest democracy failed to domesticate and fully implement the provisions of the Maputo Protocol — a situation experts have argued makes Nigerian women continue to face discrimination and sexual harassment in society.
With the recent sexual harassment allegations made by Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan against Senate President Godswill Akpabio, followed by her suspension, questions have been raised on Nigeria’s failure to implement effective legislation that guarantees protection against sexual harassment and gender-based violence.
Sexual harassment is a widespread problem that affects people of all ages, backgrounds, and professions in Nigeria. According to a 2019 survey, 60 per cent of women in Nigeria have experienced some form of sexual harassment.
How Nigeria’s paper-tiger laws weaken the war against sexual harassment
Despite the existence of laws intended to protect women, many legal provisions remain insufficiently defined or enforced. As the enforcement of these legislations remains weak, cultural biases continue to obstruct victims from seeking justice.
As though not enough, many provisions in the customary and Sharia [Islamic] laws negate the provisions of the law against discrimination enacted by the Federal Government and are more entrenched.
Speaking about the issue, Salami Zainab, a data analyst with DOHS Foundation, a Lagos-based femicide research hub, blamed policy gaps and the lack of political will as some of the obstacles hindering Nigeria’s full implementation of the protocol.
“Despite the country’s commitment on paper, there is little political accountability to implement and enforce gender-focused laws. Policymakers often prioritise other political interests over women’s rights,” she told DUBAWA.
Like Zainab, Ifeoluwa Olayiwola, a lawyer in Lagos State, concurred with her. “We have a weak legal framework and inconsistent laws, especially in the North where there are Shari’ah [Islamic] and customary laws that sometimes conflict with the provision of Maputo Protocol.”.
The legal practitioner also argued that this Protocol’s nonexistent enforcement allowed Mr Akpabio to violate the natural justice principle of ‘nemo judex in causa sua’ — meaning a man cannot be a judge in his own case.
“Let’s look at ‘nemo judex in causa sua’ in the context of the Natasha vs Akpabio issue. This principle suggests that Akpabio, as the accused person, cannot serve as the judge in the same case, but I feel like Senator Natasha was denied this right,” she said.
“Until there is a full implementation of the Protocol, there wouldn’t be fair hearings in sexual harassment cases,” she added.
Both of them emphasised the need for domesticating the Protocol, which they said would help in the war against sexual harassment in workplace settings.
Conclusion
While Nigeria has set in place various instruments on the subject of sexual harassment to protect women, the failure of the government to enforce them is questionable. It makes women vulnerable to abuse while their perpetrators go scot-free without prosecution.
