A Voice For the Voiceless

MISSION

The Advocacy Project seeks to help community-based advocates produce, disseminate and use information, and so become more effective advocates for human rights and social justice

The Governor's Wife

Mrs. Eki Igbinedion, wife of the governor of Edo State, has a reputation for being regal and aloof. But she came down from her private quarters late at night to receive joint delegation from the Advocacy Project and Women's Consortium of Nigeria. It was proof of her deep commitment to the campaign against trafficking. Some call it an obsession. A few call it good politics.

During her husband's first year in office, Mrs. Igbinedion established herself as the point person on trafficking in his administration and also showed herself to be a thoroughly modern political wife.

Friends and colleagues say that it began under embarrassing circumstances. She was invited to a meeting of governors' wives by the First Lady of Nigeria and was deeply ashamed when Edo State was derisively described as Nigeria's capital of prostitution.

This turned her into a tireless campaigner. She has created a new nongovernmental organization, Idia Renaissance, aimed at reviving the cultural life of Edo State, and has given so many lectures and interviews that they fill a book. When a new film "Izozo" came out that portrayed trafficking in lurid terms, she attended the launch and had the film translated into all the major dialects of the state. She has sponsored three public education meetings.

This has brought plenty of attention. In November 1999, she was visiting a market when a young man pressed a note into her hand, giving the time and address of a upcoming clandestine meeting that was to organize the trafficking of several girls, including the young man's sister who was about to be sent abroad against her will. The governor's wife alerted the police, who raided the meeting and arrested the gang of traffickers. Unfortunately, they could not make the charge stick, and the traffickers were released. This failure has turned Mrs. Igbinedion into an ardent advocate for toughening the law and making prostitution a crime.

Some criticize her for grandstanding. Nigeria, they say, has a long tradition of first ladies in Nigeria who latch onto the latest fashionable cause and then lose interest. Trafficking is certainly à la mode: the wife of the Federal Vice President, Aminu Titi Abubakar, has also created her own nongovernmental organization, the Women Trafficking and Child Labor Eradication Foundation.

There are two problems with these initiatives, say the critics. First, they rarely last. Second, they tend to snuff out the kind of patient, bottom-up efforts needed to eradicate practices that are deeply embedded in a society. There is no room for anyone else when the governor's wife is on stage.

This is not what you hear in Edo State. Here the governor's wife is seen as providing groups like AWEG with political cover and occasionally even protection. This is crucial because the interests that support trafficking are so deeply embedded.

And even those who dislike her imperious approach have to admit that the governor's wife has plenty of courage. Her campaign against trafficking has not been universally popular. Women have stripped themselves in her presence, abused her, and even spat at her in public to show their hostility. It takes guts to oppose the traffickers. If popularity is what she seeks, this is hardly the best cause.