Leadership (Abuja)
Kunle Somorin
6 May 2008
In the National Assembly, there has been so much frenzy on what should be done to equalise opportunities for people with disabilities. Penultimate Thursday, Senator Bode Olajumoke's Bill requesting for a Commission to take charge of the cause was tabled. Simultaneously, the House of Representatives was also committing a similar welfare Bill brought by Hon Abike Dabiri to the Beni Lar-led Committtee on Youths and Women Affairs, after it scaled the hurdle of second reading. But why did it take so long for people with disabilities to be recognised as a vulnerable group to be protected? Last Tuesday, a special forum was convened by the International Republican Institute to dissect the position of people with disabilities within the framework of the Electoral Reforms of the present administration. Leadership's KUNLE SOMORIN who was at the seminar reports:
It was an emotion laden event. Even when the active participants asked not to be pitied, nobody was in doubt that this vulnerable group of men and women with special abilities are being discriminated against, solely on the account of their physical deformities and challenges. The snag is that many of them were not born with these vicissitudes. Some of them were born free and whole, but the vagaries of human existence, inchoate policies of government, especially unchecked quackery in the health sector, reckless driving and poor infrastructure have driven many of our compatriots to the fringe of living.
The helplessness of what fate had dealt on these persons; notwithstanding, many of them have overcome the limitations of their state to carve a niche for themselves in academics, commerce, technology, the professions and other noble spheres. They are lawyers, educators, development professionals, accountants, even engineers. Some have reached the zenith of their professional callings, as professors within the ivory towers, icons in businesses and sports. But they have been united in one area, where many of them sightless, with leprous fingers, weak and distorted limbs and legs, people with hearing impairments and all have not been able to conquer: the political realm.
Yes, quite a number of them have had the good fortune of being called to serve as Special Assistants/Advisers in some 11 of Nigeria's 36 states, but that to them is mere tokenism. "What is Special Assistant, when you have someone like Danlami Bashar, a lawyer of decades with a string of 5, degrees and you are talking of SA, why can't he be made Attorney General of a state?" blurted a participant in reference to the President of the Joint National Association of Persons with Disabilities (JANPWD). He found the expression of some of his disabled colleagues distasteful that some of have been given political appointments!
"It is a big disgrace and humiliation that the best we can get is a derogatory designation as Special Assistant on the Disabled in the states…Does it mean we are incapable of dealing with normal situations?", he asked rhetorically.
Notwithstanding the emotiveness of the participants, it was a bull-eye for this special vulnerable group. The assemblage of some of respected technocrats and politicians drawn from the international development agencies, government, academia, bar and bench, political parties' stalwarts and media attested to the seriousness of the issue under discourse. This more than ever underscored the attention the issue of equality before the law and the need to redress the patent imbalances in access to public offices, skewed enfranchise and limited opportunities to which the disabled groups have been exposed. The exposrue of the widening hiatus now as the country embarks on another journey to review its constitution and reform Electoral system could not have come at a better auspicious moment.
Led by eminent jurist, Justice Bola Babalakin as chairman, ably assisted by the immediate past chairman of the Independent Corrupt Practices Commission and retired president of the Appeal Court, Justice Mustapha Akanbi, the tone was set for an intellectually stimulating exercise. The Guest Speaker was iconoclastic university teacher and constitutional lawyer, Dr. Osagie Obayuwana. While papers were presented across three sessions on the following sub-themes: Elections and People with Disability: An Overview, presented by Ms. Ekaette Judith Umoh, the Executive Director Family-Centred Initiatives for Challenged Persons (FACICP); Advocating the Rights of People With Disability: The Role of the Media by Mohammed Okerejor, a former Director of News Voice of Nigeria and later managing director of DAAR Communications and Political Participation of People with Disability: The Way Forward addressed by Ladi Iliya, the National Vice President of the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC).
Opening the session, Justice Babalakin stressed the inevitability of the main theme. He noted that it was a long-overdue process of ensuring that people who are physically challenged are engaged constructively in the nation's electioneering process "in a manner that results in improved participation and representation." He called on members of the National Assembly and journalists that it was a divine mission to ensure that those otherwise not mainstreamed into the governance process of Nigeria are released from the shackles of marginalisation and unorthodox forces of eternal subjugation.
"People with disabilities are products of natural existence", he enthused." They found themselves where nature placed them. It is therefore the duty of the entire populace to make them happy". He reminded participants as co-travellers on this planets, it behoves the lawmakers and advocacy groups to avail the disabled persons of empathy, love and for government to consciously accord them the "the course of freedom, to rights and privileges of citizenship". These, he explained are the rights to vote and be voted for.
Waxing poetic the octogenarian legal luminary said: Yesterday is cancelled cheque
Tomorrow is promissory Note
Today is ready cash. USE IT
To explicate his justification of the need not to brood about the past, but the expediency of the speeding up of the integration process of the disabled.
Country Director of the International Republican Institute, Dr. Mourtada Deme and the Mission Director of the United States agency for International Development, Ms Sharon Cromer asseverated the underlining principles behind the USAID-IRI intervention as part of the democracy-strengthening mission globally, a mandate that is being pursued in over 140 countries.
For them, by providing political exposure and experience to those who did not have ample opportunity to participate, political space within Nigeria would be expanded through advocacy campaigns in order that respect of peers and reluctance to challenge the status quo would be relegated.
Insisting that USAID and IRI are mere facilitators, Deme said it was only to provide a forum for interaction that the summit was convoked. Quoting copiously from international conventions and Declarations, he situated the position of people with disabilities as being at par with and not inferior to the so-called able bodied men and women. These laws include Article 1 in the 30 Articles embodying the Universal declaration of Human Rights which proclaims that: "all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights", even when he observed that in the last two decades, international attention on people with disabilities had thinned down and eclipsed by advocacy from other vulnerable groups, such as gender activism, child's rights advocacy. He recalled that Nigeria is signatories to a number of such conventions, even as there is a groundswell of opinion that they are yet to be domesticated into the country's statute books.
He called for concerted efforts to give recognition of the special needs of the most vulnerable people and the urgency to promote the realisation of these ideals.
"It is not enough for government to refrain from taking actions that could negatively impact, the obligation is there for government to take positive action to reduced the disadvantages and give appropriate preferential treatment to vulnerable groups so as to ensure full participation and equality", he exhorted.
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