The Advanced Learner Oxford Dictionary defined the family as a group made up of two parents and their offspring. It could also be a group made up of two parents, their offspring and their close relatives.
The family is the most important unit. This is because it is the main base of every social organisation. Name it, family meeting, clubs and associations, security outfits, companies and corporations and most importantly, governments of all types and levels.
Membership of the aforementioned are all contributed from various families. People are members of families before they become members of the above cleavages. So, it becomes imperative for the family to be given a wholesome priority in the consideration of anything in the society. This is because as soon as the family is affected negatively, the society is already in trouble. Disrespect the family and you disrespect everything in the society, but respect the family and everything shall fall in line positively.
The family is the source of the world’s population. It was instituted by God himself and so when the family is not given its rightful place in any society, it is a sin.
Recent events in Nigeria today seem to show that we don’t have commensurate value for the family Or that we just don’t care. If not, what reasons informed the clamour for public life for women in Nigeria. The clamour is so much that we begin to think its apostles and adherents are considering only one side of the coin and are oblivious of the other side.
That gender equality is the best thing that can happen to Nigeria is nothing  near the truth. I want to say through this medium that if we go ahead headlong as we’re bent on doing, it will backfire and we will be the worse for it. Our high sounding and favourable hopes of good results will be a far cry.
What is gender equality if I may ask? To me, gender is a word used to show whether an animal is male or female while equality suggests parity. It further suggests that whereever we have five men, there should be five women as well. It also suggests unisexation that there should be no difference between the sexes. That whatever, without exception, a man can do, a woman can do and should do as well. Proponents of this theory argue that the development that we crave in Nigeria will be all ours if this happens.
But we are seeing it on the contrary. Apart from the fact that it is naturally abnormal, it will directly stir up a lot of confusion and complexities as too many concepts will be re-written to our hopelessness. This is because it already suggests that the word gender will lose meaning and something else will replace it which for now I don’t know.
Unisexation would make God a liar for making one man and the other woman, one strong and the other weak, and for making one for Himself and the other for man. This will be in pursuance of our avowed decision to disobey God and damn the consequences. Women all over the world are demanding equal participations in all human endeavours with high sounding words but without patriotic considerations to its aftermath on our society. Let’s believe it or not, the devil called unisexation is responsible for all the sordities we find in the societies today. The kidnap saga, militancy, corruption and all other vices that we find in our societies today are aftermath of unisexation. This is because the first assignment of unisexation is to pull the women out of the family where God put them and where their activities make more sense and are more beneficial. As women lose focus and concentration in the family, many evils follow consecutively.
As they run out of the family in a mad rush, the children are on their own. When the children are left to train themselves, they naturally turn out to be anything. They expediently imbibe whatever character they find around. What is expected when a woman rushes out of the house even before her husband who also naturally hurries out, sometimes, before the children are up from their nights sleep, only for the parent to return home most times when children have gone to bed.
When this condition ensues, what happens to the children’s morals? How are their characters formed? Who fills the gap? When children are left in the hands of school teachers and househelps, anything can happen. When a woman boasts of her escapades in her office as director, law-maker, governor, local government chairman, minister, taxi driver, mechanic, electrician, security guard, agbero to mention but a few; with their attendant inconveniences, how can she favourably perform the duty of a good mother? When a woman regularly hops down her matrimonial bed to attend late night political meetings, time consuming board meetings and sleeping outside her home in the name of duty, such a woman is no longer a woman nor can she be called a “wife” in the real sense.
To be continued.

Eddy writes from Port Harcourt.