Berkley Center

Background: This discussion between Bilkisu Yusuf and Thomas Bohnett took place on July 8, 2010 during the WFDD/USIP/Berkley Center symposium on women, religion, and peace. Yusuf recounts highlights from her career as a journalist in Nigeria, during which she frequently ran into government opposition to her coverage. She discusses the resurgence of Islam in northern Nigeria and the deficits she sees in Islamic leadership in the region. Created with an Islamic perspective by Muslim women, her organization, the Federation of Muslim Women's Association of Nigeria (FOMWAN), is meant to fill yawning gaps in government services. She has recently moved more directly into addressing conflicts within society. The city of Jos in northern Nigeria has been rocked by ethno-religious violence, and FOMWAN has responded with protests directed at government and with mediation and outreach to Christian groups at the local level. Yusuf also touches on maternal mortality, education for girls, and the failures of governance in Nigeria.

Can you tell us a little about your childhood and your family?

I was the only girl in a family of five. Mine was a family of teachers. My great-grandfather was a renowned Islamic teacher and gave my father and his brothers Qur'anic instruction in the home. At the age of 13 years old, my father decided on his own to go to a government school. He was the first one in the family to do that; the tradition in the family was to go to Qur'anic school, and then to become a teacher in that same Qur'anic school. But my father broke that tradition and became a Western-educated person. He worked as a trainer of nurses. He belonged to that first group of northern Nigerians who took over from the British colonial masters when they left the country in 1960.

My mother did not attend formal school but did get a Qur'anic education. Uniquely for a woman at that time, she had always been involved in income generation. She was a gold dealer, she ran a small food processing operation, and she sold textiles, particularly during the Muslim festival of Eid al-Fitr. I grew up in family where everybody had something to do!

My father valued education because of what it had done for his own life, so he sent all of his children to school. In my city at that time, all the best schools were run by Christian missionaries, but my father didn’t like the idea of sending his young children to missionary schools, where we would be asked to buy Bibles and be taught all these Christian things. He found a Muslim private school, the only one in town. It wasn’t a madrasa, where you just do rote learning; it was a formal, co-educational school, established by Yorubas, which provided a Muslim education alongside non-religious education in grammar and mathematics. There were Christian students there as well.

Does that model still exist in northern Nigeria? I think the perception is that it’s binary, either madrasa education or non-religious education.

Yes, that model was common. Often in community schools there were madrasa classes running in the afternoon after the regular class.

Was it common at the time for girls to go to school?

Most girls would just go to neighborhood schools. It wasn’t common to travel, as I did, so far to school. I had cousins who were withdrawn from primary school because my uncle did not put a priority on girls’ education. He didn’t think it was important because, after all, they would grow up and get married anyway. Our family was different because of my father’s conviction that going to Western-style schools had changed his life.

Where did you go for university?

I attended Ahmadu Bello University Zaria, about an hour-and-a-half away from my home, where I studied political science. After graduation, I went for the one-year national compulsory service in an administrator’s office in Gombe.

After national service I came back home to Kano, got married, and had two children. Then I left my 11-month-old son with my mother for one year so I could go back to school. I went to the United States, to the University of Wisconsin at Madison for a master’s [degree] in political science.

When I returned to Nigeria, I went to work with the Ministry of Information. Not long after that, I went to work with the Triumph, a newspaper which had just been established in Kano. I started as a columnist and then rose to become an editor of the newspaper. After some time, I moved to a newspaper in Kaduna, the New Nigerian. I had some problems there, because the government was trying to dictate to us what we should write about. They didn’t want us to be critical of the regime, but because the newspaper was funded by taxpayer money, the government insisted that they had a right to guide the editorial policy of the newspaper. For about nine months I refused to sign my name in the newspaper unless I was given the freedom to do what ought to be done. But in the end they brought on a managing director who fired all of us.

Where did you go?

There were three editors who were sacked at the same time because we all refused to toe the line. We remained in Kaduna, and with one of our colleagues who had left earlier we established Citizen Communications, a magazine on politics, culture, and economics. We ran the magazine for four years, and then we closed shop because of the difficulties of sustaining a publication at that time. We still use Citizen Communication as a media consultancy, but when the magazine closed down we all became columnists at a newspaper that was established by one of us called the Daily Trust. It started in Kaduna but now has national circulation.

When did you know you wanted to be a journalist?

When I finished my service at university, I looked around, and there just weren’t too many options. The civil service was a drag—boring, bureaucratic, unchallenging. One could become entrenched in civil service culture, and that wasn’t the type of life I wanted for myself.

I had no journalism training whatsoever, but journalism is like teaching—you are learning every day. For you to be able to inform others and to educate them, you have to be informed yourself and be educated yourself. I have a voracious appetite for learning, so I thought journalism would offer me what I wanted. I applied to the local television station, but the person in charge of recruitment said he had a better option for us. He told us to go to the local press, to the Ministry of Information, where they are setting up a newspaper. But I got tired of waiting for the newspaper to take off, so I went to graduate school, and when I came back I went straight to Triumph News.

How many other women at that time were doing journalism like this at the time?

In the newsroom, there were very few of us. And at management level and editorial level I was the only one. I was a pioneer in my field in northern Nigeria at the time.

Did people question you? Did they say that women can’t or shouldn’t do this?

No. They saw it as a progressive thing, that I was being a role model for young girls who wanted to become journalists.

Have you seen more women and girls follow in your footsteps?

I have seen some, but it could be faster. A lot of them don’t like journalism because it is tough work. A lot would rather work in civil service so they can go home and look after their children. It’s not a comfortable life, and people like comfort—especially the generation who came after us. We were interested in making sacrifices, but I have noticed that they like their comfort. They are not interested in working 24 hours, at odd hours, sometimes with risks.

Do you find that the spirit driving your interest in journalism is something of a generational thing in Nigeria? The current generation of youth is so far from independence. Do they see the country differently?

I was 7 or 8 years old during the period around independence. I didn’t understand at the time what independence was, but I can remember the celebrations. I still have souvenirs in my house from independence.

By the time the current generation started growing up, things had changed. There was more money around, and materialism had crept more into life. Services weren’t maintained. Public schools, for instance, virtually collapsed. The secondary school I attended was a prestigious government school, but now it and schools like it have collapsed, and if you want education you have to send your children to private schools. If you want healthcare, you go to private hospitals. If you want electricity, you buy a generator. If you want security, you pay for neighborhood watch or you employ a night watchman. So what does government do for you in terms of providing infrastructure?

Someone suggested to me recently that the longer that government fails at its essential purpose, the harder it is, in a sense, to get it back, because people stop expecting government to deliver on its basic duties. Do you feel that way in Nigeria?

I have seen the erosion of good governance as progressive. I’ve seen corruption creeping in, a lot of it because of the military. When the military came to power, it legitimized corruption, and some of the things that we valued were destroyed, like the entire civil service. The mass sacking of civil servants in 1976 created a sense of insecurity. After that, civil servants started amassing wealth and abusing power because they were afraid they could be sacked without compensation and left hanging dry if they did not stash something away for a rainy day. That was the beginning of a downward trend, and we’re still not out of it. With every regime it seems to be getting worse. It’s very depressing.

Changing the subject, how have you seen Islam evolve in northern Nigeria in your lifetime?

I’ve seen revitalization: more schools that teach Islam, greater inclusion of Islam in school subjects, and more preachers around. But I have not seen much in terms of changing lives.

How do you mean?

The ideal community for Muslims is the medina, where there is food for all, shelter for all, equality before the law, and the caliph would be held responsible if anyone went to bed on a hungry stomach. I didn’t see Islam shaping people’s lives like that, in terms of moving towards the welfare state. There is a lot of learning, but people aren’t practicing what they have learned. All of these things are spelled out in Islam, more than in any other religion I think. Governance, democracy—everything is there, every part of life has precepts in Islam. But I haven’t seen Muslim leaders imbibing that culture. It hasn’t impacted our lives as it ought.

Can you tell me about FOMWAN, the Federation of Muslim Women Association of Nigeria, an organization that you founded and that has had a lead role in mobilizing against the recent violence in Jos?

FOMWAN was established in 1985 as an outcome of a conference we held under the auspices of the Muslim Sisters Organization, which was itself an offshoot of the Muslim Student Society (MSS). We had noticed that the gender dynamics in MSS were not providing room for us to discuss our own issues. We wanted positions in committees and a space of our own, but MSS wasn’t responsive. And so we left. We initiated a move to create MSO, the Muslim Sisters Organization, which is in about eight states now doing its own community-level work.

Then, at the MSO conference in 1985, we decided we should have a federation of Muslim women’s organizations to act as an umbrella group, and that became FOMWAN. We now have member organizations in all the states but one. FOMWAN’s structure is just like that of the country. We have national, we have state, and we have local structures. In 25 years we have built over 400 schools, five hospitals, and three orphanages, all from zakat funds.

FOMWAN has also catalyzed the formation of Muslim women’s organizations across English-speaking West Africa. We have chapters in Ghana (FOMWAG), in Sierra Leone (FOMWASL), in Gambia (FOMWAGA), and in Liberia (FOMWAL), who all attend our annual conferences. We have a conference coming up in August, celebrating our twenty-fifth anniversary.

And all FOMWAN activities are funded by zakat?

Originally they were. For 10 years we did not work with any donors, because we did not want to be donor-dependent; we wanted to do our own thing. But after 10 years donors were knocking on our doors to work with us.

The UN was the first to engage with us, and then we started working with the Packard Foundation on maternal health, which was an issue we were already working on. We worked with them to help build the capacity of our health workers and that of Muslim health facilities around the globe, as well as on reproductive health, promoting family planning as a means of reducing maternal mortality.

You also do gender training. Could you tell me more about that?

I work with ABANTU for Development to do capacity-building for NGOs from a gender perspective. We run trainings on mainstreaming gender into employment policies, into organizational culture, into how organizations conduct training. People don’t think about these things naturally, so there is a need to raise that consciousness.

Some of our clients are intermediary NGOs, and some are community-based organizations. We also get requests from some donor groups to do basic training for their partners. We did that for the British Department for International Development and with Swedish SIDA, for example.

You mentioned maternal mortality. Is that a priority in northern Nigeria?

Northern Nigeria is, as one columnist wrote, “the sick man of Nigeria.” In terms of health and education, we do very poorly. That is particularly true with maternal mortality. If northern Nigeria were its own country, it would have the world’s worst maternal mortality rate. Reducing maternal mortality and promoting child survival in northern Nigeria has been a challenge for us. It has become difficult to effect change, and so we established AdvocacyNigeria, which is what I am doing now.

Who are your top advocacy targets?

Local government, because the local government is the closest to the people. We work with legislators who hold the purse strings of government. We work with traditional and religious leaders so that they will raise awareness in communities of the need to use modern health facilities. There are people who still don’t want to go to hospitals, even when the facilities are there, and so we work with religious and community leaders to try to get household heads to allow their women to go to hospitals.

What I hear you saying is that right now there is not a cultural priority on maternal health.

No, though evidence has shown that some people don’t go simply because they can’t afford to. We are advocating for the government to make maternal healthcare, and healthcare for children up to age five years old, free. The northern state governors declared that they would make maternal and early child health services free, but in most states it did not move beyond the declaration.

Advocacy succeeds through two things: consistency and tenacity. You have to be patient and keep working. We develop messages, we use evidence, and we work with community people. Most of my people are volunteers, men and women who come from all works of life and believe in eradicating maternal mortality and child mortality. And many of my advocates at AdvocacyNigeria are Packard-trained reproductive health leaders who know the issues and have a commitment to work in their communities.

Are there many clergy involved?

They are not exactly the majority in AdvocacyNigeria, but the chair is an Islamic scholar who is also a health worker.

Can you tell me more about your work on malaria? How is that going?

It’s going well. We are distributing 60 million nets in Nigeria. This program is setting the pace in terms of a new way of working together with faith-based leaders at the highest level. That sends a signal to state and local governments to emulate it.

Do you think the government will fund it at a national level?

There is a commitment to fund malaria, but I would not trust the government to fund it as it ought to be funded. We have been battling to get the government to give at least 15 percent of its budget to health, but we have not moved far from the 8 percent that we have had for the last five years. It really could be better, since you have examples of countries in Africa, for example Botswana for one, which has 15 percent of the budget going to health.

FOMWAN is also involved in peacebuilding. Can you tell me about how the organization came to these issues?

The person who introduced me to peacework was Judith Asuni, who is the founder of Academic Associates PeaceWorks, and is now a fellow at [the United States Institute of Peace]. She invited us to look at conflict and the media, and then she exposed us to doing peace work in communities. From that time we never looked back. We started engaging and having interfaith discussions. We decided we should also be working on peace to ensure that we also contribute to ending community conflicts and making our communities safer and more secure, and promoting unity among more women of faith.

And what was the mode of operation in terms of peacebuilding? How would it work?

Dialogue. We would do joint activities with Christian women, and we would work with interfaith groups and mediation centers at the community level. And NGOs felt that FOMWAN was the only way to reach out to Muslim communities for peacebuilding projects.

We had one interesting project in Jos where we brought people together for things in a relaxed atmosphere, like football matches. Sometimes that is what you need to cement relationships, and then we can establish groups in communities that can look at signs of conflict and intervene. We also started working with Imam Ashafa and Pastor James, founders of the Interfaith Mediation Centre in Kaduna, who do wonderful work.

Recently, in the wake of recent violence in Jos, FOMWAN demanded a seat at the table to say that there cannot be any impunity, there needs to be justice. Is that new, or is that something you have always done?

That is something we have always done, if not at the national level, then at state levels. For a long time the women of FOMWAN have spoken on behalf of Muslims when there was some issue the government wanted to address, because it was easier to work with us than with the men’s organizations, where there is so much bureaucracy they can’t respond promptly. The men do not have a rapid response like we have, so the government has turned to us to speak for Muslims.

What are the next steps for FOMWAN in bringing justice following the recent violence? What are your plans?

Our plan is to work with local chapters and the Christian societies. We believe that the first thing is to start with the dialogue. We can’t start anything unless we come together and talk. And then the healing will begin, and only then can you begin to talk about building something together.

How is FOMWAN’s response different from the response of male leaders?

The male leaders are under the Supreme Council, the highest Islamic body. The group is led by the sultan, the emirs, the clerics. Bureaucracy has made them not as effective as they ought to be, and they don’t seem to be implementing projects in their communities. All they do is just meet and discuss the sighting of the moon for the month of Ramadan and the start of Eid al-Fitr, and when to break your fast. The Supreme Council has its own niche; it is seen as the policy-making body, but that is about it.

Now they are trying to reform the organization to make it more effective, and they have been engaging some state governments regarding issues concerning Muslims. That is a welcome development, but they can’t match FOMWAN for now until they finish their reformation and all their structures are in place. In times of building communities, it is FOMWAN who will look out for you. Increasingly we have been invited to take up positions in government committees and have input into policies, because the government recognizes the work we are doing—building hospitals, addressing development issues, etc.

Do the men feel threatened by this?

If they do they have not shown it. For a long time they ignored us; it took them 18 years to recognize our work and invite us to their general meeting, but now we attend regularly. When they set up their reformation committee, they invited us to come and share how we were so successful in our work, with so many projects relying on our resources. We told them how we established FOMWAN, and they were very impressed. From that time on we have been working together with them in implementing the reforms.

They don’t feel threatened by us; they just envy our level of success. They are 25 years older than us and do half of what we do. That is a challenge for them.