Category: New Woman

In her sixties, Folorunsho Alakija obviously holds the world in her pocket with a successful family life and business empire. Instead of going to sleep on her laurels and achievements, the woman who is one of Africa’s richest continues to explore ways to empower others, especially widows.  In this interview with Yetunde Oladeinde, she talks about life as a minister of the gospel, passion to heal marriages, secret behind her successful marriage and more

WHAT inspired the ministry? Many years ago, my husband and I were in the church, the Cathedral Church of Christ, Marina. There was an announcement by the provost of the church about those who would want their homes to be used for fellowships. My husband said we should put up our hands, and we did. And from that time on, we have been on and that was how it started. Over the years, they grew by leaps and bounds and then we moved to a fellowship in Victoria Island and then God told us to move to Surulere. We own the premises and we decided to use it for His work.

This building was being built about seven years ago and we had a business here, the large format printing now known as Digital Reality. I remember that the Lord actually told me at that time that this building was for this work. The rest is now history. He told us to move to Surulere, we started looking for a place that we could rent to move the ministry to. We looked around the stadium, we looked everywhere but it also happened that God who directs things, orchestrates things, also works things out in a perfect manner. That business was moving out of these premises to bigger and larger premises in Yaba. It just came in handy and we just decided why we don’t move into this one? That He said that this place would be used for his work, has He not done it? As far as the ministry is concerned, He sent different revelations to me and said I should write a book on marriage.

When God speaks to you, He would confirm it through others. He also gave me the title of the book and he flashed it on top of the screen of my computer on one occasion. I wrote the book, I tried to sell the book; I was having difficulties trying to sell the book. I tried to push it in the bookshops, but you know that in Nigeria we do not have a reading culture. They were collecting dust on the shelf and then someone whispered in my ears that you may need to start talking about this book in churches where people can talk about the book and they would call you to talk about marriage and that was how it started.

From then on, whenever I go to minister, what would take four or six months before you sell 50 copies, we were selling like 500 copies at a go. So we have sold several thousands of the book and are about to go and reprint more copies. We have been called to different events in different parts of the world to talk about marriage. I give God the glory.

God called me and I waited for Him for months. I prayed He should tell me what to write. He should give me the title of the book. I waited for four months and He didn’t give me the title of the book until I actually put pen to paper and I started writing. It is obvious that marriages are in trouble all over the world. I began to make my investigations and I was getting my facts and figures. I started getting the details about breakages in marriages in different parts of the world and I used the statistics to write. I also interviewed people and they were telling me about the challenges and tribulations that they were facing. Some of those stories, without mentioning their names, are in that book.

We also have a book for widows titled, the cry of widows and orphans. This is one of the platforms for creating awareness on the plight of this marginalized groups.

What is the secret behind your successful marriage?

The secret is learning to wait on the Lord. The secret is trusting in Him and believing in the Lord. You know that children cry, trust and obey. I have been learning to do all three and in the process of doing all three, He has been opening doors, directing my footsteps and showing me the way I should go. To be able to do this thing the way He wants me to and leading me to the people that He wants me to talk to, people that He wants to hear the word and to heal marriages.

How often do you intend to have the marriage sessions?

We have decided to hold this programme every quarter. It is not a programme that we want to hold every month yet, until the Lord says so. We have a prayer retreat on these premises on a monthly basis called, “Yes Lord prayer retreat”, and we have stolen one of them, which is the one that should hold today and we have been using it for the marriage prayer retreat, interactive session to heal marriages as the Lord leads. Today is the second one and the next one will be on the 12th of September and the next will be the second Saturday in December. The people are enjoying it, they are hearing about it and it is making a difference in their lives.

What advice do you have for young couples?

For young couples, I would say that they should look inwards, look at their parents, look at how their parents lived their lives and talk to their parents to tell them how their grandparents lived their lives. Things seem to be getting more and more difficult. There is no way you can talk about the family and not talk about the economy. It is because the economy is getting tight, that it is having effect on homes and marriages. So, God is asking us and telling us to go back to the drawing board, to go back. We need to go back to those times that our forefathers believed in the word of God and they were led by the Bible. They weren’t led by naira and kobo.

Some ladies for no fault of theirs have become single parents, what advice do you have for them?

We can’t generalise like that. It is better to take particular situations, because you can’t hear one side of the story and if you do not hear the other side of the story, you can’t know who was wrong. The bible teaches us a lot on what to do and how to do it. The marriages of today, you find that the women are not ready to submit to their husbands and the husbands are too busy painting the town red; as a result of which I would say that two wrongs do not make a right.

For instance, the woman does not agree that she should submit to her husband and she is busy arguing with him, trying to compare what they are doing in England, America and they want to bring it to bear in our own society, where our own society, where our culture is different, where we have been brought up differently from those cultures and they want to do things the way they are done in the west, then it won’t work. It will break. Our forefathers and mothers did not do it like that. When their husbands said jump, they would ask, how many times should I jump? I come from a polygamous family, where my father had eight wives and they all lived under the same roof. They found a way to be able to live together, with one man at the centre. I am not saying that polygamy is right, or that it is the will of God, but I thank God that even before my father and mother died, both became born again. Their eyes were open and the scales fell off.

What does your husband mean to you?

After God, my husband is next. He is loving, kind and generous to a fault. I don’t want single ladies to hear that and think that they can come and snatch my husband because he is sold out to me. He is sold out to his children; he is sold out to his family. We appreciate one another and November will make 39 years that we have been married. We courted for three-and-half years. So, I just thank God for his life because he is a man of understanding. He is a man who fears God in his heart, a man that puts his family first and foremost. I just thank God that we met. If it was another man, maybe we would have parted ways but God who saw his heart, saw my heart brought us together and God who decided that He wants to use us in this end time. No regrets, as far as my marriage is concerned. We will continue to love one another. He keeps telling me that if we were going to come back to this world again, that it would still be me and I tell him the same too.

Amina Salihu is a political scientist and over the years she has carved a niche for herself in activism, as well as farming. She lectured at the Ahmadu Bello University between 1993 and 2000, and later worked for the West Africa-focused organisation, Centre for Democracy and Development. She was Senior Special Assistant, Social Sector, and, later, Information and Strategy to Nigeria’s former Minister of the Federal Capital Territory, Mallam Nasir el-Rufai. As Strategy Advisor, Amina designed the Abuja Town Hall Meetings and the FCT Helpline for governmentcitizen communication and feedback.
In this interview with Yetunde Oladeinde, she talks about the things that spurred her, people she admires and gender as smart economics.

HOW would you assess affirmative action, 20 years after the Beijing Women’s Conference in 1995?

Not too bad, I would say. The first is that, we have been able to demystify the fact that Affirmative Action is a woman’s thing. Even before Beijing adopted it, it was something that was used to address issues across race in places like the United States for example. You have to ensure that people of Africa descent and non African descent had equity.

So what we did was to apply a gender lens to Affirmative Action and people understand that it is not new. For instance, the Federal Character Commission and if the president wants to constitute his cabinet now, he has to have at least one minister from each state. We are saying that it is fine, but chances are that all these ministers would be men. There are capable women in that community. So as we are thinking geographic affirmative action in terms of federal character, we should also think about gender. That is changing mindset and you can begin to see the changes. The private sector for instance has women on all boards.

The board of the Central Bank of Nigeria has more women than it used to have because there was a governor, Sanusi Lamido, who said we can do better. Even the political parties that we thought would never change, some are saying that for every three delegation there must be a woman. That is Affirmative Action; we are getting there gradually. What we have to do is to be consistent in our arguments and the second is that when we get there, we should use the space well. It is not as if the men are using the space well but it has taken us so much to get there, we cannot afford to make the mistakes they made. Now that we have a different kind of leadership, where is the hope? The burden is more on us, we really are pathfinders and we must continue to find the path.

How did the passion for activism start?

Passion happens as a result of life’s experience. While growing up, I had a lot to learn. I came from a working class background. I grew up very close to the barracks and I had to sell peanuts, eggs and everything that was seasonal to support my mother. The difference was that any time there was school, I dare not be anywhere else but on my way to school, long distances. The country was safer then and our parents weren’t afraid to send us to school.

You had to expend energy and that hardens you. I not only wanted a better life but didn’t want anybody to go through that kind of life. You grew up in a family where you see the men not treating the women well and you are powerless because you are not only a child but a female child. So when I got to the university, I connected to the student union and unionism and from there to the women’s groups that were made up of feminists.

They were people like Shameen; I was in Women in Nigeria (WIN) with Ayesha Imam and co. Everyone’s life in the women’s wing was connected to her in one way or the other. I knew that there was an option and they took me in and refined the ideas. From there, there has been no looking back.

Let’s talk about gender as smart economics…

Gender has to be looked at as smart economics, because a lot of the time people think it is just to push out justice matter. So, it becomes a bit more difficult to convince policy makers, especially men who do not have this women’s liberation reality because they are not women and do not understand why they need to plan with women or look out for them.

 Even to reach your own development targets, you need women; so it is two ways. Even when you do not focus on women, you need women because they are the ones who would raise the children that you are looking at as the future human resources; they are the ones who run the homes.

The second reason is that the women of Nigeria themselves make up 50 per cent of the population. How do you hope to make progress if you are not meeting the needs of 50 per cent of your population? Women are dying giving birth to children.

The national average for maternal mortality is 545 out of every 100,000, but you know that it is just an average. In the northern part of Nigeria, over 1500 women die out of every 100,000. Look at the conflict and how people are being displaced. Families have been decimated and women are everything rolled into one and you do not address their needs. How can the country move forward? Women are drivers of growth, whether in the family or in the community.

You are also a framer. How did this start?

I have always had a passion for farming. In secondary school, I had the choice between Home Economics and Agriculture. To be honest, maybe because I had always had feminism in me, I just couldn’t understand the trauma that I saw my colleagues go through. I went to an all-girls school, Federal Government Girls School in Bida. By the time they had the home economics class, there would be tension; they carried pots, plates, they were afraid that could fall, the food would burn or they didn’t finish on time.

I told myself this is what my mother has taught me, so why am I stressing myself all over again? So, I said that I wasn’t going to do Home Economics and the moment it was no longer compulsory, I was the first to jump that class. I figured that Agriculture was more interesting. I had never done it before and then it was still connected to food without the trauma. It was between you, the teacher and the land. We had the school farm. So you could plant a groundnut, you could do practicals and learn things in textbooks.

 I liked the idea of dealing with things that were special. Our teacher told us that everybody needs farmers. Nobody told us anybody needs cooks because everybody should be able to cook by themselves. In my final year, I got the prize for Agriculture and that spurred me because I was doing what I liked. The lesson I learnt here is to allow our children to do what they like, guide them to choose. Then at the Federal Capital Territory, I got talking with a colleague who told me it was easy to raise fish and I wanted to know more.

He said, ‘you have to go get water-logged land; it’s assumed it’s not productive land for housing, but you can go fishing on it.’ So, I said let’s go hunt for it. That was in 2005, and I incorporated a family company called Fawaz and Salamina. It got strong and there are three branches of the farm now. We have fish, chickens and rams towards the Ramadan period and the crops. The crops are cultivated, it’s an integrated farm and we use the crops as feeds for the animals. This year, you would find maize and soya beans on the land.

How has it been ten years down the line?

No regrets! It can be a heart breaker; there are good years and bad years, but when you are doing what you like and it is something that allows you to give back. We have a foundation where we assist young people and give them land free for five years. Give them fertilizers for free and connect them to the market, put them into a cooperative. Each farming season, they put aside a saving to make them independent in future. In the process, they have understood the government and how the system works. Today, we are talking to a microfinance bank in Kaduna and they have their bank accounts, they know how to turn agric waste to bricketts. I do that because I know I have a future dimension to myself. There is nobody that is self-made, somebody, somewhere gave the push.

Tell us about your role models

My mother would always be a role model because of what she went through. There are more women like that in the community, just doing their own thing and we don’t even know them. It’s a 24/7 job and it is thankless. Prof Bolanle Awe, just visited her at Ibadan, Bisi Adeleye Fayemi, as well as men and women that are doing great things. I also admire Governor el Rufai of Kaduna State and Kole Shettima, they have done so much for women.