Each time I see my father, I feel a dangerous wave of anger. So much that I have to struggle with myself not to insult him or even do worse things to him. The situation becomes even worse when I see what my siblings have become. I just pray to God to continue to give me the strength to be able to totally forgive him, but I don’t think I can forget it. The injury is just too deep and present everywhere”.
This is the level of bitterness Damiete feels for her father. According to her, if it were possible to reverse the hand of the clock, she would have preferred to be fathered by another man. Her case is only one of numerous cases of gender inequality meted out to girls in the Nigerian society.
Damiete, now 35, is the second child of a family of four. She has an elder sister, who is 38 and is infected by HIV, a 33-year old younger sister, who still believes that her life depends on what she can get from men, and a younger brother (30), who feels that it is her primary responsibility to cater for all his needs at all times, and makes sure that she, her husband, and children have no rest until his usually bloated demands are met.
“I don’t blame him”, she said, “He grew up being indoctrinated by our father that while there is no need to train girls because they belong to their husbands’ families, it is the responsibility of women to cater for their siblings and parents”.
She recalled that as a girl, it was easy for her and her two sisters to understand that the only plan their father had for them was for them to get married and leave his house. At what age they did this did not matter to him.
Meanwhile, he focused on the only son of the family, assuring him that he is the man of the family. The situation became unbearable after the death of their mother, with their younger brother barely three years.
Out of frustration, her elder sister had a bastard son at the age of 16. Her second pregnancy was with a fisherman, who was cohabiting with two women but had children with a total of five women. Her sister, however, fell for him because he always gave her fish from his catches, which ensured food for them as a family, including their father.
She later had a miscarriage with a notorious boat driver whose prowess as a womanizer transcends the Kalabari Kingdom in the South-South of Nigeria. It was in trying to save her life from the effects of the miscarriage that she was diagnosed of HIV, which she is currently living with, “though she has realised herself”.
For her younger sister, Banimi, who is still carried away by her beauty, which is fast fading away, she believes that having been able to build a three-bedroom bungalow through resources garnered from her numerous sexual escapades, she can have ample investments through the same source that can take care of her at her old age.
On her own part, she reminisced, she got lucky to have met her husband as a friend when she was just 14 years old, two years after she forcefully lost her virginity to a friend of her father, who feigned to be a helper of the family.
Her husband, then a rig worker with an oil company, lived in her community. After they became friends, he found out she wasn’t schooling. She had dropped out of school in Primary 3 after her periwinkle business couldn’t provide the required fund for her school. She thus concentrated on how she and her siblings can feed daily.
Her husband ensured that she went back to primary school, then to secondary and subsequently university, where she bagged a B.Sc. in Banking and Finance. As a Bank Manager, she is now not only the breadwinner of her family, but also the only one with a stable and assured future.
Currently, Damiete has to contend with maintaining her job, taking care of her nuclear family, which comprises her husband and three children, her siblings, whose dependence on her increases by the day, and her father, who unrepentantly prides himself as the source of her success, simply because he is her father, and hence demands to be taken care of.
This may be only a minute case in gender inequality taken too far at the detriment of a family, community, State, and country.
Gender Inequality is simply the state of not treating the male and female genders equally, or the situation where the male and female are not given equal perspectives, as portrayed in the above case. It takes different forms in different places and countries.
This is against the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 5, which seek to “Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls”, in the next fifteen years, beginning from September 25, 2015.
The sole objective is to provide women and girls with equal access to education, health care, decent work, and representation in political and economic decision-making process, which will expectedly fuel sustainable economies and benefit societies and humanity at large.
It is noteworthy that all the 17 SDGs, with 169 targets between them, are intertwined: Goal 1, for instance, which seeks to “end poverty in all its forms everywhere”, also recognizes the fact that gender inequality plays a large role in the perpetuation of poverty and  risks inherent thereto, as portrayed by the Damiete scenario.
As far as Damiete’s elder sister is concerned, she has been “exposed to potentially life-threatening risks from early pregnancy”, according to the third point under the SDGs’ Goal 1, while Banimi has to live with “often lost hopes for an education and a better income”.
Gender inequality which in this context implies unfair treatment given to female gender with respect to the male has many causes. The causes include culture and tradition, religion, lack of empowerment, mentality, and inadequate education, all of which are deducible from the Damiete scenario.
A critical analysis of the scenario reveals that Damiete’s father’s belief that girls belong to their husband’s family made him not to invest in the life of his three daughters by depriving them of the things they need to be self-sufficient and capable of contributing to the upkeep of the family.
In the process, his first and third daughters fell out along the way. The only son in whom he had all hopes also fell out. The only person that got empowered was Damiete, and it was because her husband, a man, came to her rescue.
The question is what would have happened to the entire family, if Damiete’s husband had not come into the life of the family?

Soibi Max-Alalibo