Hey guys, How are you all doing, hope you all are keeping safe and taking all necessary precautions in combating the covid-19, well I am back, just like soccer 🙌🙌🙌🙌🙌. I have not posted for quite a while, juggling the boredom of being locked up in one place, online courses, YouTube videos, playing games and the rest, I forgot my blog and my wonderful readers ðŸ˜ðŸ˜ðŸ˜ðŸ˜. Well, I apologize, forgive me and keep reading, more would come.
As the International Day for widows draws near on the 23rd of June, we draw attention to some of the acts of injustice on some of the widows around the world. Widows in the world as at 2018 totalled at 260M with 585M kids left fatherless. Widows suffer all manner of ill-treatments rooted in cultural and traditional practices that dehumanise them. In many underdeveloped and developing countries of the world like Nigeria, widows are treated with little or no respect. Most of them also suffer social exclusion, hunger and poverty along with their children. Moreover, many are driven to suicide as they are made to see widowhood as a death sentence. However, their counterparts in Western countries are quite fortunate as they are more secure and often have their own sources of income. In Kenya, there are lots of opportunities that encourage volunteers and Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) to help widows and their kids get their lives back. While there is no statistics of widows in Nigeria, the country has more than its own fair share of the population of widows and fatherless children. The situation has been compounded by the security challenges in different parts of the country, especially the Boko Haram terror war in the North-east axis that has raged for close to a decade now, throwing up countless numbers of widows and fatherless kids. Findings reveal that the majority of these widows are middle aged, between 35 and 55 years of age, with little or no chance of remarriage. Almost half of them had only primary education and are of low professional status; 48% of them earn very low salary, and had a high parity, having 5 or more children.
Widows in Nigeria are besmirched, abused and even traduced. They are seen as the prime suspects in their husbands’ demise bar those widowed by conflicts. Those who lose their spouses through natural causes or accidents are not spared. They are oftentimes accused of witchcraft. They are also subjected to harmful practices, one of which is forcing them to drink the water their husbands were bathed with even after embalmment to prove their innocence, shaving of their hair and demanding they put on black clothing while mourning the death of their loved one for more or less a year.
Most widows tend to develop health issues as a result of the ill treatment conjured with the pains of loss. When that happens, the family members of the deceased breadwinners throw their arms into the air and exclaim: “This is exactly what we have been saying!” Indeed, the Nigerian environment is very hostile to widows. Besides subjecting them to inhuman and other degrading practices, most victims are dispossessed of their husbands’ belongings such as houses, cars and businesses, they are then thrown into the streets empty handed, not caring a hoot about the welfare and future of their fatherless kids.
Some remedies to the widows plight include encouragement of female education, enhancement of women, economic empowerment, improving availability and effective utilization of family planning services and encouraging men to write their wills early in marriage. Also, through advocacy and public health awareness campaigns, to enlighten the masses about the plight of the widows, in order to eliminate the dehumanizing traditional practices to which Nigerian widows are often subjected.
