Nigeria has restated commitment to ensuring that older persons in the country are treated with dignity and respect.
Director General, National Senior citizens Center in Nigeria, Omokaro Emem said this at press conference to commemorate the International Say of Older Persons, in Abuja Nigeria.
She said the 2022 theme ‘Resilience of Older women in a changing world: from resilience to empowerment’ is an indication that women are most vulnerable to abuse and unfair treatment.
“When it come to ageing, you’ll see that poverty and hunger have the face of a woman. If you look at the trajectory of life, from the girl-child, through adulthood, and then to later life, you see the systemic discrimination. When you talk about out of school dropouts, there are more girls than boys. When you talk about early marriage, they’re of course girls, which means they’re cut off from their educational opportunities. And then when you now talk about empowerment through education, they’re are not given.
“So you see that there’s a trajectory. Their lives are defined more than older men by life’s circumstances, unfair norms, events that make them powerless, so to speak and make them more vulnerable.
“So you can imagine a girl child, out of school dropout, maybe early marriage, and then later on into widowhood, and now at old age. So you find a trajectory of poverty, right from that age, that’s the vulnerability.“
According to her unfair norms inherent in most cultures does not allow women ownership to property despite their huge and selfless contribution to the Society.
“And now most of them at old age due to unfair norms, can’t have land , they depend on subsistence farming, but in most cultures and traditions the woman cannot own a land. Thank God for Supreme Court, anyway”.
“But because most of them are in the rural communities, they don’t know what supreme court is all about and because of that, they lack access to Justice and it comes to old age”.
“So if we are talking about resilience and the focus is on older women, it’s to show that you’ve to be tough as a girl child and then you’ve to brace up and face society as an adolescent, as a girl child to be in that class, to go to school, and then you’ve to be tough in marriage as well, to keep that marriage and continue to work.
The DG further states that when talking about resilience, the women have been the more resilient people.
“And most of them are heads of households. Because as widows, they’re heads of households, so old age brings a kind of jeopardy, you are a woman, you are an older woman and you’re old. Each has its mountain discrimination, but yes, they’re the toughest.
She also described the woman as an umbrella.
“In your culture, when you call somebody Mama or grandma, everybody calls her so. So that woman is an umbrella for so many in that community. That’s the power of the woman.
“That’s the woman that’ll go to the farm, that’s the woman that’ll go to the market, that’s the woman that’ll take care of grandchildren, that’s the woman that’ll tie money on that wrapper and still bring it out and pay school fees for the grandchild, that’s the woman that’ll stay hungry so that that child will eat, that’s the same woman that’ll be called to come and do Omuogou, because if the woman doesn’t go, the city girl doesn’t know how to birth a baby. So she has to suspend everything, go there, stay for 3 months, before she can now come back and continue. That’s the woman that doesn’t have a consistent income, the work they do is not recognized as work,“ Dr Emem explained.
The Director General National Senior citizens Centre maintained that the Nigerian Government is committed to its plan of ensuring that older persons become bonafide Nigerians by mainstreaming them into policies and activities by taking into consideration who they are, their challenges and demography.
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