Women Have Always Been Commodities – Kukah Fumes, Knocks Nigerian Culture

Bishop of the Catholic Diocese of Sokoto and Founder of The Kukah Centre, Matthew Hassan Kukah has said that the Nigerian culture was designed to encourage injustice and oppression, particularly against women.

Kukah lamented that women have always been commodities, constantly treated as spoils of war.

He asserted that Nigerians constantly defend injustice, abuse, and attacks meted on women in the country in the name of religion or culture.

The clergyman argued that religion, which had all the instruments of reformation, has been wrongly applied in Nigeria, thus placing the country in its current bad shape.

Kukah urged women to begin to stand up and fight for their rights like Malala Yousafzai, a Pakistani education activist who survived an assassination attempt at the age of 15 for speaking out publicly against the prohibition on the education of girls by the Pakistan Taliban.

The preacher spoke at the public presentation of the National Ethical Policy for Combating Gender-Based Violence, GBV in Nigeria, in Abuja.

According to him, women are being viewed as commodities using religion as a cover-up.

“Women have always been commodities; if a war ends, you give out women; if you want to make peace, you give out women; and we as Christians and Muslims believe that it is not culture that created human beings,” he said.

Speaking on how the Nigerian culture was designed to encourage injustice and oppression, the bishop said, “I recall vividly the images when we were little children when your father was beating your mother, you can only go and hold her leg or your father’s leg because that is the best you could do.

“Our African culture also suggests you cannot go and report your father, you cannot go and report your mother and your father is beating your mother until he kills her, you cannot say anything because ‘how are you going to disgrace your father?