Women's
Issues to the Fore
“THE POLICE have taken
over the people’s forum,’ Nkoyo Toyo announced
to us. She spoke with the kind of strength and conviction
that has made many an insecure male quake (and there
are so many).
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Maybe it was coincidence that the police left
just as soon as she spoke. We like to think not.
Nkoyo Toyo speaks for the rights of women,
for the rights of people. And how she does. Women’s
issues are at the fore at the Commonwealth People’s
Forum; how could they not with the likes of her and Hazel
Brown around.
Hazel Brown has campaigned 40 years now for
women’s rights in Trinidad and Tobago. Her campaign
has done so much to double the representation of women in
local government in just a few years.
But there is more at the centre, at the village
that speaks of an ever stronger women’s voice. Like
the bank that village women have set up in Nigeria for some
reasons that are obvious, and for some that are not.
Another group is here to speak of its campaign
to take commercial sex workers off the streets. It is working
to build their capacity in other areas.
And like Brown in Trinidad a group of Nigerian
women are here to talk about their campaign to support women
in political life. That group and Brown’s inevitably
have had much to talk about. Just the sort of thing the People’s
Forum is there for.
A meeting on affirmative action declared that
one in three of those elected next time in 2007 should be
women. That is still short of the goal of 50 percent, but
it has been taken up for now as goal enough.
The women were in fiesty mood. They adopted
a demanding tone for rights long overdue. And that is becoming
the tone of the people’s forum. This is not turning
out to be the colourful picnic on the side that some were
expecting.
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