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“Everything boils down to looking after women. That is how you fix society.”
Travel writer, Noo Saro-Wiwa, said this to me in our interview.
I read her book The Burning Ground: Oil and Militancy in Nigeria, which tells a detailed history of how oil and oil companies have destroyed lives and the ecosystem of the Niger Delta, leading to violence from a public needing to make a living.
And while this book tells that story, I also believe this is a story about women’s rights. Saro-Wiwa says Nigeria demonstrates “ how women's rights directly affect the natural environment and society and how the absence of those rights feeds into this militancy which ultimately hurts men.”
“I was just struck. I think the Niger Delta really illustrates that more clearly than in any other society.”
Saro-Wiwa told me, in so many words, that she realized how the Delta serves as an intense microcosm of the inequities faced in the Western world, where we often say we are for women’s rights in principle, but in practice fail to deliver upon them. The Niger Delta illustrates how corporate capture of resources, the pollution the extraction causes, and the government complicity in that extraction create the conditions for disaffected men to turn to violence when pollution has eroded their ability to earn a living off the land.
However, when the government response is to offer stipends to former militants (who are men), ironically, men are then incentivized to turn to militancy with the promise of a government stipend. In the eyes of some of the people that Saro-Wiwa interviewed for her book, many of them believe the government could solve the Delta’s problems if they actually started giving that money to the “peace builders,” as former militant-turned-farmer Mac Eteli said.
“ Governments are not interested in the persons who are ready to contribute to sustainable peace," he said.
“ He's absolutely right. The government has done things completely the wrong way around. It's having to spend billions of dollars in monthly stipends… to pacify militants when really…those billions should have gone towards promoting farmers like Mac Eteli. It should have gone towards educating the young people of the Niger Delta so that they can then go on and create job opportunities for themselves and for other people,” Saro-Wiwa agreed.
The ‘peacebuilders’ in this book are those who perform the undervalued work of tending the land, resolving disputes, and creating opportunities. Many of these people are women, and Saro-Wiwa’s conversations with these civic leaders leave an undeniable truth on the page for the reader to absorb.
When societies prioritize human rights and the lives and livelihoods of the everyday person, especially women, that is—as Noo Saro-Wiwa says—how you fix society. Her conclusion is supported by extensiveresearch. While each nation will have nuanced challenges toward true equity, it's clear that if nations want more sustainable lives for their citizens and healthy ecosystems, this is the path forward.
Prioritizing human rights, at the end of the day, shouldn’t be a thing we do simply because it improves our lives. It should be the thing we do because it is the right thing to do.