Former United Nations Organisation (UN) chief, Regina Amadi-Njoku, made history in Year 2000 with her appointment as the first female Assistant Director-General of the International Labour Organisation, a very important arm of the UN. In this interview with PAUL UKPABIO, she recalls her success secrets as a woman leader in a male-dominated institution and the challenges that came with being the ILO and Regional Director in charge of 53 African countries. Among other issues, the retired diplomat and former university lecturer also speaks about her growing up days in Lagos and how her cosmopolitan upbringing in the Campos neighbourhood of the city influenced her career and world view.

IT is quite interesting seeing a woman climb to the top like you did in the United Nations and other institutions where you have worked. What has been your success secret?

My life is simultaneously forged in the city and the village! My childhood was quite colorful. I was born in Lagos, then the capital city of Nigeria, in the Campos neighbourhood, which is famous for its multi-national and multi-cultural dwellers. The unique place of my birth, my family intergenerational living arrangement, my formal western education and the combination of my living in the city and spending long holidays in my parents’ rural communities in Southern Nigeria shaped my hybrid cultural upbringing and prepared me to easily straddle a dual cultural lane of traditional and modern lifestyles.

Campos and its upscale environs of Onikan and Ikoyi were home to European expatriates and many Nigerian professionals, male and female. Lagos, where I grew up, was a real melting pot of cultures. It was inhabited by peoples from various cultures: Nigerians, Brazilians, Sierra-Leoneans, Togolese, Ghanaians, Cameroonians, Lebanese, Chinese, West Indians and Europeans. It was a mini United Nations enclave. Children in my neighborhood benefited from traditional African collective childrearing from parents of the community. We were taught that education, community service, excellent social manners, good character, honesty and compassion were the hallmarks of a good upbringing.

I grew up seeing different people confidently going about their businesses, and living out their culture from norms, food, clothes, festivals, religions and so on. I saw women being homemakers and also professionals such as teachers, nurses, secretaries, accountants, doctors and lawyers. I never felt that my gender could bar me from achieving my life dream. I naturally assumed that I was going to be a homemaker and a professional.

At that tender age, what were you curious about?

I was curious about the abundance of amenities in Lagos and the scarcity of the same amenities in the rural villages we visited during the holidays, especially since my grandmother made me go to fetch water in the stream and pick up firewood. I think that the village experiences subconsciously guided my choice in profession. I just knew that whatever profession I would choose, it would have to be modelled after the ones exercised by the women around me in Lagos and the development work my grandmother and her rural women groups were doing to improve lives in their communities. My career path might have been influenced by my growing up in the city and the villages, but my leadership and management qualities were forged through an adjustment to my mother’s premature death. As the first child of my father who was an only child, I had to take up leadership and management duties very early in life. I benefited from inter-generational mentorship and coaching from women and even men in our extended family.

My father was the most important role model of disciplined, yet nurturing leadership for me and my siblings’ lives. He believed I could achieve great things and gave me an extraordinary dose of confidence, pushed me to get the best education and to aspire to the highest position possible. I am ever grateful for his support and contributions to my life achievements. He used to discipline us with many sayings and proverbs.

Notable among them are “Survival is seized in the midst of tragedy”, “Leadership is acquired in the trenches of crisis” and “Management is learnt in the midst of scarcity.” The wisdom in these sayings I hold dear to my heart and have tried to pass it on to my children.

As Regional Director for Africa at the International Labour Organisation (ILO) with the grade of UN Assistant Secretary-General, we understand you were directing ILO programmes in the then 53 countries of the Africa continent and you were also ILO’s Special Rep to the African Union, the Regional Economic Communities, the United Nations Economic Community for Africa and the African Development Bank. How did you feel wearing all these hats at the same time and what were the challenges involved? 

To comprehend my challenges as the first women Assistant Director-General of the ILO and Regional Director for Africa, it is important to describe the uniqueness of the ILO.  It was created in 1919, after a destructive world war, with the aim to pursue a universal and lasting peace that must be based on social justice. After the UN was created in 1945, the ILO became its first specialised agency in 1946. Incidentally, the ILO established its first field office in Nigeria in 1959, before the nation’s independence in 1960. ILO is a unique UN agency with normative and developmental objectives. It has a tripartite structure of three stakeholders: the governments (regulators of labour), the workers (suppliers of labour) and the employers (the demanders of labour). ILO is highly political as it aggressively advocates labour standards, employment and job creation as effective instruments for economic and social justices for all peoples.

This was the world I entered in 2000 to take charge of all ILO programmes in the whole continent of Africa. I was prepared to a certain extent for this daunting job as I had worked at the World Bank and UNIFEM, now UN Women. I had also lectured at universities and had been a civil servant and a diplomat. The skills acquired through these positions prepared me, to a large extent, to perform and excel at the job. But they did not prepare me for the kind of the tough tripartite negotiations required to broker industrial peace between unions, employers and the governments in a continent of different language blocs which included Anglophone, Francophone, Arabophone, Lusophone. I had to learn fast!

The great confidence my boss had in me, his coaching, the well of support from my country’s government and some colleagues, especially the women, helped me to perform well and achieve the objectives of not only the ILO office but also those of the tripartite partners. I was one of the few regional directors recruited from outside the ILO who stayed for a long time: a term of eight years.

What were the challenges that you faced?

Yes, there were several challenges of which the greatest was leading as a woman in a male-dominated institution while managing some major events which occurred during my tenure. First, the transition of OAU to AU with the primary responsibility of my office to support the reform of the role of the Labour and Social Affairs Commission in AU. Secondly, the occurrence of some national conflicts on the continent which required intensive hands-on attention of the ILO in mitigating their negative impacts on job creation and labour relations. Thirdly, finding a balance between a high-level job that demanded constant travel and family life was extremely challenging.

Nevertheless, I immensely enjoyed the experiences and achievements the job offered me and I remain ever appreciative of the experiences, expertise and networks acquired through the job, which I have been sharing with African young professionals and leaders of today.

As an expert on labour issues on the global stage, would you say the average Nigerian worker has fared well over the years, compared to global standards?

I will be very cautious in answering this question as I have been out of the loop of active labour sector management for a long time. However, from what I learn from the media, from the Covid-19 reporting and personal observations, life is becoming increasingly untenable for workers in most countries, including Nigeria. Most of the gains made in MDGs are fast evaporating and hopes of effectively implementing SDGs are threatened. Poverty is on the rise among workers and families. The Nigerian workers’ situation is exacerbated by the devastating health and economic impacts of Covid-19 which have made a bad situation worse, in that it has triggered high inflation, a steep fall in the value of the naira, and high rise in the cost of living, all in the contextual climate of an existing high unemployment rate and cessation of non-essential work due to Covid-19 lockdown.

The most painful fallout of this is that any prior discussions on minimum wage becomes impossible now since the minimum wage must be recalibrated based on the newly increased cost of living and the depreciating value of the naira.  Furthermore, the criteria of access to social protection and security that favors the workers in the formal sector and excludes those in the informal sector heightens insecurity for majority of the population who operate in the informal sector while fueling some sense of insecurity.

These create a conundrum of challenges exacerbated by COVID-19 and its attendant health and economic costs. The challenges are also worse in the informal sector where income for daily bread is also sourced on a daily basis and the majority of the populations, workers and families are disproportionately affected by limited access to utilities like water and light, needed for implementing the Covid-19 protocols. The availability of sufficient palliatives and access to them may prove difficult as the determination of beneficiaries will be challenging especially in cities and even in villages.

So, is there any hope for the Nigerian worker?

Curiously a protective solution adopted to stem the spread of Covid-19 which constituted in total lockdown and mandatory working from home for non-essential workers may offer a unique opportunity to start addressing the dichotomy of attention given to workers in the formal and informal sectors. We can take advantage of how the big companies are re-imagining work, workplace in the home spaces; and worker rights and conditions, including emoluments and benefits packages, to start thinking out of the box regarding the employment reform needed to enhance and harmonize the treatment of all workers in the formal and informal sectors of the economy.

You have worked in Nigeria, Switzerland and the USA. From your experience, which of these countries has the best work culture and environment?

For every professional, each country offers some advantages and disadvantages. The most important advantage is the peace and support in the workplace that helps professionals achieve the institutional objectives. The next advantage is measured by the facilities the city of work offers the professional and family, like housing, proximity to the office, transportation and security. Of course, low cost of living is a big plus in a city of work. The greatest advantage is a city that enhances a professional’s ability to enjoy quality work, life and family balance. Geneva offered most of these advantages while Nigeria offered me the work-life and family balance. Washington was very advantageous in offering phenomenal access to enormous networks of learning from peers and institutions. Accessing supplementary education is very easy in the US. As I said, each city of work offers different comparative advantages for the professional or worker.

What is your message for the girl-child in Nigeria?

In my view, we the adults are failing the girl child as well as the boy child. Both are dangerously exposed to negative development events and technologies of the 21st Century. Of course, the girl child bears, as her mother, the brunt of most of the negative cultural and technological driven disadvantages of development.

The only advice I can give a girl child is to create awareness in her regarding her precarious state, which could even start before her birth, ‘femicide’, and provide her with strategies, skills and networks to enable her to fight off the numerous abuses she will be subjected to before her teenage years and adulthood. The girl child is a legitimate heiress of her mother in all respects, made to accept and cope with her preordained and pre-birth lower status, the paucity of her rights and the presumed ownership of her body by the boys and men in her life.

The boy too is a real heir of his father; proudly modelled after him even before birth, with high status, numerous rights and limitless access to leadership, ownership and power over man, woman and nature. The stage for suffering abuses related to women inequality is set for a girl baby and a girl child. The rest moves into action, like a movie. The irony is that we adults marvel at how and why the girl-child should suffer so much abuse. We conveniently ignore that we wrote the script and we direct the movie of her abuses. I have tried to address this and other inequality issues suffered at all ages through an NGO, “Other Half Empowerment Initiative”, which I founded several years ago.

Would you say that the lockdown contributed to the numerous rape cases that have occurred in Nigeria lately?

The phenomenon of rape and other forms of violence against women and girls (VAW & G) had been rampant before COVID-19 in almost all countries, including Nigeria. Actually, VAW & G, including rape and domestic violence constituted a global pandemic long before the COVID-19 outbreak. However, there has surely been a significant spike in rape and gender-based violence cases in Nigeria since March, which incidentally was the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. The high frequency of rapes and gruesome rape-related murders exacerbated by COVID-19 lockdown has shaken the entire nation to its roots. These heinous acts were quickly denounced with a nationwide outrage and swift action taken by Nigerians, especially by women who took to the streets to demand urgent action on rape and justice for its victims. This necessitated an urgent response from President Muhammadu Buhari who declared that ‘violence against women is a national crisis’ and reiterated his government’s commitment to fighting gender-based violence.

I really appreciate the governors of Nigeria’s 36 states who quickly followed suit by declaring, for the first time in history, a state of emergency on rape. The serious mobilization of national consciousness, mostly by women organisations on the horrific nature of rape and rape instigated murders of young women, girls, and even elderly women fast-tracked the adoption of concrete actions to fight all forms of VAW & G. Most important among them is the proposal to establish a registry of sex offenders and rapists for the first time in this nation’s history. This is a very big step in the right direction as Nigerians are mobilized and ready to take concerted actions to address rape, which is one of the most contemptible acts of VAW & G.

Having had the experience of coordinating the first generation of UN global VAW & G campaigns in 2000 as the Regional Programme Director of UNFEM (now UN Women) for West Africa, I greatly admire and commend the Hon. Ministers of Women Affairs and Humanitarian Affairs. Their highly coordinated and rapid-response advocacy and campaign against VAW & G yielded unprecedented, prompt and concrete results. Additionally, their strategic collaboration with women and human rights CSOs, and the clear terms of engagement and partnership with the federal and state governments, and community leaders also aided greatly in this endeavor.