HRH Omu Onyebuchi Okonkwo is the Omu of Obio Kingdom, Aniocha North Local Government Area of Delta State. In this interview with EMMANUEL IFEANYI, she speaks on the need for women to occupy leadership positions; challenges facing women in politics; identity crisis among Igbos outside the South East, and predicaments of the girl child
Many Nigerians will like to know what is Omu and What it means to be an Omu?
Omu is the Queen Mother. She’s the mother of the town. The ancient men created the position of Omu to help the king. Omu is like a helper to the king. Omu is like a mother to the entire town.
She attends to the spiritual affairs of the town. But she’s still under the king. Omu has her functions. Omu is in charge of the market and the women.
Omu has her chiefs the way the Obi (Eze or Igwe) has his chiefs. Omu takes up cases concerning women and adjudicates on them. Omu is 70 per cent spiritual, 10 per cent to herself, 10 per cent to the women, and 10 per cent to the market.
But she’s still under the king. What you hear or see about Omu is simply a mother to all or a mother spiritual guide to the town. Omu is the spiritual head of the women and the market, guided by the king.
How does one know she is an Omu, and what are the things expected from an Omu in the Igbo society?
Omu is selected by men; the king and his chiefs. When you’re selected, you have no choice but to come back to your town to answer the call.
The things expected of an Omu are quite clear. Omu must be calm, spiritual, have foresight, and be agile and up and doing because her job is lengthy. She needs to guide the town spiritually and must be spiritually inclined to be an Omu.
You can never know that you’re an Omu until they go to cast the lot. When it falls on you; even if you’re in your husband’s house outside the village, you’ll have to leave it and come back home to serve because it’s a spiritual title that needs serious spiritual inputs. You become a spiritual mother to the entire town.
Are you comfortable with the role women have played so far in leadership of Nigeria?
I can’t say I’m comfortable with the role of women so far. Not that women have been bad, but because I believe they have been denied the opportunity to showcase their leadership skills. As a nation, we need to give women a chance. I say it with all seriousness that this country needs to give women chance.
If you check today, in politics, we barely have a few women in important positions. The shocking thing, however, is that sometimes, the women form stumbling blocks for themselves, but that’s not their major setback women have anyway.
Most times, when a woman is coming out for some of these positions; you’ll see that her fellow women will be used as instruments to pull her down. It’s strange and is not supposed to be so. Men often speak with one voice in politics, but with women, that’s not the case.
Maybe because they don’t like their kind to lead. Honestly, I don’t know why some of them do that. No matter what, I believe that when a good woman comes out to contest for a position, women are supposed to love their fellow woman and show her support.
We need to allow women to be part of leadership because sometimes women carry grace. Women speak the truth and we should give them a chance
I’m saying this especially when it comes to taking up leadership positions. I’m not saying that women should hate men during politics and men should hate women, but what I’m saying here is that they should show support to their kind and stop the unnecessary antagonism.
Whenever a woman wants a position, let her fellow women stop antagonizing her and saying many things just because they don’t want her in that position. I’m saying that such characters are not fair to the woman aspiring for position. We need to allow women to be part of leadership because sometimes women carry grace. Women speak the truth and we should give them a chance.
Now, let me tell you the major setback of women in their quest to gain leadership positions. It’s the men. The men are the problem. Please, I want to talk to you our men, please give our women chance and let them have some space to function.
If there are 10 positions available, give them three and take seven, and that wouldn’t be too bad. For women, I’m begging you, stop pulling down your kind. You need someone that’ll be a voice for you. If a woman is not there, the men will not want you to be there. When a woman comes out to run for a position, rally round her and support her to achieve it.
It’s for your own collective good and for the general good of our land. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala is married to her husband from Abia State, and she’s doing very well. There are other women whose names are ringing bells because of their achievements in leadership positions, and they’re going higher. These women are never associated with any form of failure.
But the men, I guess, are the major problem because they don’t want to give women the needed chance despite the problems coming from the side of the women as well. I just pray God will continue to enable our women to continue to do well.
How would you rate the present generation of Nigerian women in leadership positions; do you think they’re playing their role in nation building, well?
With no iota of doubt, I believe that our women in leadership positions have really tried. Some of the women, who have been there, have really tried. Those women, who have climbed to the top leadership cadre in the country, have really tried.
The only problem they’re facing, as I previously said, is the men. And if only the men will allow them to be in leadership, this country will be a better place to live in. It’ll be the envy of all.
The women whose names we are hearing now, even at the world level, like Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, who originally hails from Ogwashi-Ukwu, Delta State and others like the late Miriam Babangida; she’s also from this part. We have a lot of scenarios where women have done incredibly well. What they simply need is support and level playing ground to perform.
They should give women a chance. They can do well in nation building and many capacities. Some of us, who are Omu are equally trying our best in that capacity, and if given the chance, will do more. So, I beg our men not to kill the beautiful dreams our women have for the growth and development of our land. They should allow these women to show what they can do.
Do you think the pre-colonial Igbo society gave women more leadership role than the post-colonial Igbo society?
I think the pre-colonial era favoured women more than the postcolonial because in the pre-colonial, women had a voice here under the leadership of the Omu in the Igbo society. Omu handles their cases. There are some cases that will be referred to Omu, while there are others that’ll be referred to the Obi to handle.
When the colonial masters came, they killed a lot of those ancient ways and said everything should go to their own colonial courts, which to me ought not to be so.
We had Umuada, the Omu, her chiefs. The Omu and all those others mentioned had their functions in the town and were so powerful in advancing the pre-colonial Igbo society, ensuring that justice was done where it should be done.
The colonial masters destroyed this system in many places in Igbo land but couldn’t destroy the Omu in my area because it’s an ancient stool that has come to stay.
You have Obi, Omu, Odogwu, Iyase, and all the titled men. You can’t remove an Omu from our system here when she’s installed, except in the event of her death. So, the pre-colonial era was not as many thought. It actually gave women more voices over here.
Do you think the Nigerian society of today is fair to the girl-child?
There is no need for mincing words here. The truth is that this society has failed the girl child. The society keeps mounting pressure on the girl child to do evil just to survive. It’s obvious that we’re returning to the era where parents refused to train the girl-child in school as they prefer the boys because of family succession mentality.
When will our people realise that training the girl-child is tantamount to training the nation and securing the future of the nation at large? Both the girl-child and the boy-child will get married. However, records will show you how all genders react to issues of the families where they come from.
Who do you think the blame should go to over the pressure on the girl-child?
Obviously, it’s we, the parents. I’m seriously disturbed about the pressure some parents are putting on our girls, which is now obviously destroying them completely.
Some parents, out of greed, push their girls out to the cold hands of destructive elements by doing unholy comparisons between them and their peers, who may have chosen or were forced into the path of destruction, like going to foreign lands to engage in immoral activities for money.
You hear some parents telling their girls ‘can’t you see your friend who went to Italy is building an upstairs?’ These parents mount pressure persistently, and at the end, they’ll destroy the girls and completely fail her in a society, where she needed a little protection to blossom to her full potential.
I can’t throw the blame anywhere else; I put the blame on us parents. All of us, we’ve failed our girls, and we need to correct all those wrongdoings now. The pictures of the world we live in are now like a full-screen television, playing steadily to our faces. We now see our mistakes calling on us to take a step and put an end to our errors. We must rise now to amend this.
If not, we’ll all regret it even after we’re gone. If the trend continues, and these girls we put pressure on to do wrong become women with the seeds we’ve planted in them and later become mothers as well with the same wrong mentality, then I don’t know what will happen to the generation unborn.
Let’s talk about domestic violence; does it have a solution at all?
Domestic violence is the talk of the day. It comes in the form of all manner of abuse, with some physical, sexual, psychological, and otherwise. The solutions lie with our ability to accept that something is wrong and take bold steps to salvage it.
One does not need any form of research or teaching to see what’s not working out. When a woman is married and she finds out that the marriage is toxic and abusive; the next thing to do is to leave that marriage and go. It’s better to leave with your life intact than to leave as a corpse.
If the woman dies in that toxic marriage, the man will remarry without wasting time. However, you must take note that as it is to women, so it is to men as well. I’m sure that some men go through domestic violence as well, and I’m saying that the solution lies with anyone who feels the marriage is toxic to take a step. Nobody should force anyone to die unnecessarily. I’m not saying that people should go about destroying their relationships and marriages.
No, that’s not what I’m saying. I’m only saying that domestic violence is deadly and is not what anybody should face and die in. I’m also saying that whether the victim is a woman or a man, the best thing to do is to leave with your life intact.
As a leader in Igbo society, how do you react to this idea of western validation of things here?
I think it’s just us losing our identity entirely out of lack of experience and lack of proper exposure. The ancient Igbo man was already exposed to many things, even the hidden ones.
Most of the foreign culture of the present-day Igbo man that he thinks he learned from the whites was actually copied from us. Our people erroneously believed that the white man has it all and knows it all; therefore, we are inferior and must abide by his postulations.
The question our people should ask themselves, especially those who still engage in this present-day neocolonial mentality, is: If white men had it all, what were their grandfathers looking for in our land hundreds of years ago? What were they doing in our land? Why were they taking our things back to their land?
The truth needs to be told. We’ve come a long way, and I think we need the truth and not to deceive our children and generations yet to be born. We’re Igbo people. That’s our language, and that’s the name we bear
They had it all, yet they came here, pillaging our artifacts, community deities, and cultural items. If they had it all, why were they carting away our physical and spiritual belongings, taking our men and women into slavery in their land? Is that a sign of comfortable people that had it all before coming here? Obviously, they stole from us because they lacked what we had. You don’t steal from a nonentity.
You can’t wake up and go to the house of a person who had nothing to steal from him. What will you see? If the whites had it all, as some people are claiming today, why didn’t they solve their societal needs with their indigenous solutions back then? Why did they run down to the place to rescue?
The answer is simply because we had what they never knew existed. We are a people rich in culture, and our culture was our bond back then. The only strategy they used was disunity, and it worked perfectly for them. They gave us items and brought churches, and we foolishly accepted these things and treated ours as inferior.
I’m happy that gradually, the deceit is clear in our eyes and we’re coming back to reality. What we should do now is cultural retrieval, heritage retrieval, language retrieval, and identity retrieval. We must take back everything that was taken away from us by deceit. Whatever we’re not, we must abandon and embrace what we really are. By the grace of our ancestors, we’ll not fail in the mission of taking our things back.
How can the Ibo society achieve this cultural, heritage, language and identity retrieval you talked about?
If we follow the right track, I think we can. Before the coming of the white men down here, Ndigbo had been there. We cherish our culture, heritage, and language. The white men changed everything when they came, and we foolishly accepted their religion, abandoning our own.
But thank God that today, some of our people are positively returning to their roots. Note that anyone who engages in negative things and is just hiding under culture to perpetrate evil is not part of those I’m talking about that are returning to our roots.
I’m talking about those who follow the rightful, natural, and righteous ways of our fathers, who believed in truth, honesty, love, justice, fairness, kindness, respect for human beings, and respect for older adults.
The white men who came here took a lot away from us, including the truth, our culture, religion, and heritage. Alaigbo is blessed, rich in culture, heritage, and dialects.
It’s a gospel all of us must preach so that Ndigbo will come back to who they are originally and embrace the culture our fathers left for us. If we do what is needed, follow our original ways of life, without allowing an iota of evil infiltration, it’ll not take long.
Ndigbo will smile because there are a lot of campaigns everywhere now towards bringing the minds of Ndígbo back home. We need to save our culture and grab it from these hoodlums that almost mess everything up for us. Igbo is good. Igbo is extremely beautiful. I’m very proud to be an Igbo woman, and we’ll get there soon.
How would you react to the issue of identity crisis among Igbos outside the South-East?
For God’s sake, we’re in the 21st century, and the truth needs to be told. We’ve come a long way, and I think we need the truth and not to deceive our children and generations yet to be born. We’re Igbo people. That’s our language, and that’s the name we bear.
I don’t see why people will keep peddling these wrong stories of them not being Igbo over here. Irrespective of our dialectical differences, we obviously know we’re Igbos.
It doesn’t need further debate. Look at the Yoruba; no matter their locations, they still recognise that common umbrella, Yoruba. It’s the same thing with the Hausa and even the Fulani. They’re all proud of who they are. It’s obvious we’re the ones losing for not embracing our heritage as Igbos.
Some will say they’re not Igbo, they’re Ika, they’re Ukwuani, and many other indigenous names, but in the end, we’re deceiving ourselves and hurting our children. I’m begging that we should come under one umbrella because we’re all Igbo. We’re Igbos. In my village, Obio, our language is Igbo. We don’t have any other mother tongue.
Even if we’re Enuani or in Delta State, whether it’s Oshimili South or Oshimili North, all of us are Igbos, and that’s the truth. We don’t need this unnecessary discrimination. If we continue this discrimination, what do we think will happen to our children yet to be born? This is the time to speak the truth and equally tell our children the truth.
Even though some of our fathers may have made some mistakes about this obvious reality in the past, I am saying we need to correct those mistakes about identity now.
