By Joseph Lamin Kamara
Their fear is that they will lose votes in elections if they eradicate Female Genital Mutilation (FGM). And their argument is that the practice is an age-old aspect of our tradition. But they will not say the former openly. And when they are forced to talk about the issue they will either be hesitant or reticent.
FGM is not yet topical in Sierra Leone, despite the international community and rights’ activists are campaigning against it, according to the main opposition Sierra Leone People’s Party. And, according to the party’s National Secretary General, Suleiman Banja Tejan-Sie, that’s why the party has not spoken on it yet.
To Tejan-Sie, FGM becomes topical when it “becomes an electoral issue,” that’s when the electorate will want political parties to state their positions on it.
But the opposition scribe says political parties “cannot just take decisions that can cost them votes.”
“May be they have not spoken on it yet because they don’t want to take controversial decisions that will cost them votes,” he says.
“You know much of the electoral population comes from the rural areas.”
The provinces are the hub of the mutilation in the country.
Despite that Tejan-Sie is a legal practitioner and he says he’s a human rights activist. Personally, he’s averse to the practice on somebody below the age of 18 and without the consent of that person. What he cannot say is that he wants government to end FGM.
The age of 18 is what is regarded by most people as the “age of consent” and it’s something any governing politician can use as an argument that government has taken actions against FGM.
The Deputy Minister of Information and Communications, Theo Nicol, says government is not silent about the issue, but “there is no policy yet on it.”
He says government is supporting FGM advocacy groups and some soweis have been arrested for cutting people below 18. But a senior official at the Ministry of Social Welfare, Gender and Children’s Affairs says they don’t know about any FGM arrests, even during the Ebola crisis, when a government ban is on it.
But if government has already started making arrests for a violation of a mere memorandum of understanding in which it was communities themselves that willingly signed to stop the practice on people below 18 in just the rural and urban districts of the Western Area, Bo, Kambia, Port Loko, Pujehun, Bonthe and Kailahun out of the 14 districts, what else does government need to eliminate FGM? People now know that it is wrong for either Ebola transmission or because somebody has to be 18 and above, and must agree for it to be done.
Nicol does not give any other reason for government’s failure to eliminate FGM, except that he says to eradicate FGM; government needs “a lot of time and a lot of consultations.”
“It’s not something that happens overnight,” though “we have opposition from the international community,” he says.
Nigeria recently enacted the Violence Against Persons (Prohibition) Act 2015, outlawing FGM, but after many years of activism against it and after Buhari beat Jonathan in their last presidential election.
FGM is a political affair. Full stop!
If ever President Ernest Bai Koroma has plans to eradicate FGM, when will that be, when he has almost just two more years to leave office? His spokesmen say he has no plan to maintain his post. If that’s true, what then are we waiting for?
WHO regards FGM to be “all procedures that involve partial or total removal of the external female genitalia, or other injury to the female genital organs for non-medical reasons.”
The procedures take a girl or a woman through an excruciating agony. A recent report by Owolabi Bjälkander, a UNICEF consultant in the country, indicates that cutting the female genital organs is what culminates in the mutilation which can lead to damage to the genitalia.
Those who do the genital cutting are known as soweis in the female secret society (Bondo) bush.
According to them, the exercise reduces the libido of a girl or woman. They say the practice does not only take the form of cutting, but training girls in marital and household affairs.
That’s an argument, but who will really concentrate on marital or household training, when they are suffering that terrible pain of that part of your body being cut without any medical intervention?
Medical experts say FGM can cause bladder and urinary complications, and can even lead to infertility. It can also cause epidermal cyst and keloid tumour on the genitalia, according to Bjälkander.
That fear is empty, and the argument flimsy
If most Sierra Leonean politicians were not contesting in elections for only self enrichment and had no plans to manipulate their stay in power for ever, FGM would not be used as a tool of vote security.
“The fear of politicians is that they will lose votes,” Rugiatu Neneh Turay, an activist against FGM said in Port Loko Town, over the weekend.
Turay is a member of the governing All People’s Congress (APC) party and in 2008 she won the election for councilor in Ward 172 with the highest number of votes in the entire Port Loko district. She had launched her campaign against FGM. She formed her organization, the Amazonian Initiative Movement (AIM), in 2000 when she was a refugee in Guinea.
“I had just lost my mother 10 days before they took me through another horrible experience,” she said, as she recounted her ordeal in the Bondo bush.
Ann-Marie Caulker in Freetown has similar movement, Katanya Women’s Development (KAWDA).
The activists are not against the entire practice of FGM, but “it’s the crude way people practice it that bothers us,” says Caulker.
Caulker has established a school in Freetown where she gives free education to orphans and girls who run away from FGM.
Like Caulker, Turay has established a school in Port Loko, and her motivation is to provide free education to girls who reject FGM.
Mr Nicol says government is helping FGM advocates, but the help these women get come mainly from overseas.
Even if that’s the case, it’s not the kind of help the advocates want. They need eradication of the practice.
“I’m not fighting against it for age of consent, but for eradication,” Turay said.
AIM has succeeded in having three public declarations in which soweis in the Port Loko district declined from the practice. Turay said in all, she has 65 soweis from four chiefdoms in the district. She is providing empowerments for them, as they used to earn income from their practice.
“When we started advocacy, soweis came to our meetings and appreciated us, but the men undermined our move,” she said.
“So it’s all myths. Let’s the people see what the politicians have done. The point is that they don’t have legacies to point at.”
That’s a woman. A politician too, you can say, in fact an activist against FGM. Yet she won her election with overwhelming support from the same people she had been persuading to drop their knives or razor blades in the Bondo bush.
Use Ebola to end FGM
Before the Ebola outbreak, FGM was done on about 80 percent of Sierra Leonean women, according to the Guardian. But the Ebola outbreak has halted the practice almost entirely, because there is a government ban on it. So this period is an ideal one to eliminate the practice, if ever government wants to.
Wulaimatu Jalloh is the chairperson of the Mission Road community in Port Loko. She and her daughters went through the FGM procedures, but now “I don’t favour it. I want it to stop.”
She said she regretted that her two daughters went to the Bondo bush.
“I will not allow my grandchildren to take part in it,” she said.
Madam Jalloh said if government wanted to end FGM, it would was easy to do so.
“After government warned against it during this Ebola crisis, who is practicing it, or who does not know that it is wrong to do it?” she asked.
Ya Marie Sesay is a septuagenarian and a sowei at Upper Falaba Road in Port Loko. She said she had practiced genital mutilation for most of her life, but could not tell exactly how long.
“We met our people practicing it and we want it to continue,” she told me after I asked her why she was practicing FGM.
Even when I asked Ya Marie what benefit the practice had on Bondo initiates, she insisted it was a cultural tradition to them.
However, even people like her can do only what government orders them to.
Ya Marie said she would “stop practicing it completely” if government outlawed FGM.
Campaign messages against FGM have reached almost every part of the country and soweis and community leaders have begun standing up against the practice, but the most giant step in eradicating it is putting legislation against it.
Turay said that in their own campaign against Ebola “we concentrated on soweis, and they understood us. But if the members of parliament step up against it, we’ll succeed.”
“In Kono, soweis and chiefs asked us to open an office there,” she said.
That’s the case in many districts in the country, but with lack of political will.
President Koroma has hardly spoken about the issue. He has often referred people who are bothered about it to speak to campaigners against it.
Turay said she had not spoken to him personally about it, “but he has recommended people from overseas to talk to me about it.”
(C) Politico 11/06/15
