I was going into the prison yard when my dad called me on the phone. Instinctively I picked up the call and responded “Daddy, I’m in prison. I’ll call you back”. I didn’t think it through before I said that. I had dropped my phone at the prison entrance as we weren’t allowed to go in with phones. Coming out, I had more than 20 missed calls on my phone from my dad. I called back and asked “Daddy, what happened?” and he responds “What are you doing in prison?”.
For the past four years, I have been working to achieve a dream. A long-standing dream – to contribute my quota to humanity. This has taken many forms in my life, particularly in education, climate and criminal justice. I have found a way to make all these work while still being a wife and a mother.
I’m a product of communal generosity. My paternal grandparents had 10 kids and my dad was the third. To a large extent, he didn’t have a lot of financial capability. My education is a product of the generous heart of his sibling. She thought “Somebody has to do something about this bright child”. She ensured I got the education I needed and if She didn’t do that, I won’t be where I am today. This gesture got me thinking that there are a whole lot of people who for some reason may not experience the same. They might be at their tipping points. And if you don’t do what you can for them, they might not be able to recover and fulfill their dreams.
I trained as a philosopher at university. I never knew there was a field of study called philosophy when I became a philosopher. I had wanted to become a lawyer. I got the advice that it was difficult to apply to law and get it. “Why don’t you put in for something else and when you are in the school, you can switch”. The advice was from an elderly person so I took it. I applied for Political Science and English but got Philosophy. I thought philosophy was something people say “My philosophy in life is this”. I never realized it was a field of study. As time went on, I saw that it deals with humanity. There is more to this than the name, it helps you see life in a different perspective. You travel into the causality of things. This helps you ponder life and get critical in approaching it. It can yet drive people to the extreme. Some people end up becoming Atheists or tilt towards being agnostics.
One of my philosophies is that we are all interconnected in this world. We are all missing links to a puzzle. If anyone who should be in a particular circle is not there, that loophole, that gap will continue to exist. Being able to bring someone out of something or lend a hand to someone to achieve something means a lot to me.
While I was in secondary school, I would always see a lot of children in my community who were not going to school. They loitered about, playing at home during school hours. The reason most of them were not going to school was because of a fee. The Parents/Teachers Association fee or something like that. This fee ranged between 500 naira and 1000 naira (all less than a dollar) for each child and they were not able to pay. I began to save from the money I would use to buy snacks in school to help pay for these kids. I did the best I could, and for those I couldn’t help, I gathered them around and taught them basic literacy.
Helping other kids was not what everyone around me did. I didn’t even think if people were doing it or not. I found myself doing it because I felt it had to be done. I was quite emotional while I was younger, empathetic towards people’s situations. I could see someone begging on the road and I’d start crying, asking God why. I once asked God, why are there rich and poor people? Why can’t we have equity? I found myself tilting towards empathy at a very tender age. I also saw my aunt do it, with me and many other people. This made me feel like “I’m made for this”.
As little as teaching a child how to read two-letter words is one memory that I can never forget. This particular boy, his name was Emmanuel. He had no knowledge of books or words before I started teaching him. He was diligent and kept singing the new two-letter words he was learning every day. One day, a celebration was going on in the compound and he hints that he wants to do a recitation. He goes on to recite his two letter words and the reception from his audience made him feel like he was on top of the world. Some people knew about his circumstances. They knew how learning even basic words meant to him. They understood how he was feeling. His mother got so emotional and cried with him and there was me. I felt so proud. At that moment, I felt I had achieved everything I wanted to as a young person. This was in 2007, and seeing Emmanuel and his mum happy made me so happy.
Getting into the university, my focus shifted. It went from helping young kids to climate action.
It all started with my grandmother. I often saw her going to the farm whenever we travelled to visit her. She would always complain about the harshness of the sun and the smallness of her yields. One day she came back from harvesting Cassava and they looked like shrunken roots. She kept lamenting and it bothered me. I remember asking my aunt, “Why are grandma’s yields always so miserable? Is it that she doesn’t know how to plant properly?”. She said, “No, it’s climate change that is affecting the way things come out and is reducing the soil’s fertility”. It got me thinking and I started researching climate change. I began to see where the problem was. In my village, whenever they want to plant, a particular hectare of land is set for cultivation. They go on to erase everything on the land. The trees are burnt down to ashes so the sun comes down without any cover. To a large extent this affects the seedlings planted. Even those that survive make it look miserable as grandma’s yields. It made me come up with solutions like irrigation and tree planting. This was where it started from.
Another event made this more serious for me. A lady had delivered a baby on the farm and they were looking for a tree to shade her and her baby. They found none. I was on the farm with my grandma that day and saw the whole thing. The only option was to use cocoyam leaves to wrap the mother and the child. I thought to myself, this is so bad. This was where my drive for afforestation started. Since then, I have been talking about afforestation and engaging in afforestation projects.
Activism came to me as an interest. It was my unfulfilled passion for law. When I found an NGO that focused on amplifying the voices of people, I got drawn to it. If I didn’t end up being a lawyer, why don’t I contribute to amplifying the voices of people through this NGO? With climate activism, I could see the impact of climate change on everything. But far away from climate, humans are legally affected and facing repression. It could be by the government, or other institutions, etc.
Joining Hope Behind Bars Africa, an NGO, was me fulfilling the yearning of wanting to become a lawyer. I wanted to contribute to the criminal justice system even though I was not a lawyer. Every day we try to amplify the voices of marginalized groups. Doing this work led to my dad thinking I was in prison for real.
What we do is to work with incarcerated persons. In some cases, those facing wrongful incarceration and in other cases are not tried. Some of these individuals are victims of raids by security operatives. Raided and locked up often without questioning or charged for an offense and petty offences. On my first visit to a correctional facility, I shed tears. We had cases of people who got incarcerated for five years but did not commit the crime. It was overwhelming dealing with it.
Another story in my last three years of working in the criminal justice system is of a young student. He got picked up on his way from school by security operatives as a suspected Armed Robber. He first spent three months with the Special Anti-Robbery Squad after which he went to Kuje prison. He spent five years in prison before our organization intervened. He could have spent a longer time in prison as it was a capital offence. Luckily for him, there was no evidence tying him to a crime. An innocent man comes back from lectures to his house and ends up losing five years of his life. There’s no way you can close your eyes and not speak up about all these incidents.
I don’t talk about a lot of these things in the media but it gets tough mentally. Walking into the prison yard and seeing people that you know have so much to give, but they face restraint. They look at me thinking “This person can help me” but I am not able to help all of them.
Doing this occupies me on most days. Yet, my childhood aspirations on climate action are still with me. I have an NGO, Girls for Climate Action Initiative. It is a multi-pronged initiative. It speaks to climate change, afforestation, agroforestry and girl child education. We go around communities to engage in tree planting and sometimes we see students who are not in school. When asked, you get to find out as little as one thousand naira that they cannot afford keeps them away from school. So the initiative engages in paying school fees and PTA fees for young girls especially.
We take the gospel of afforestation to the farmers in the communities. We got to find out one of the reasons deforestation was becoming a big deal. The trees that are usually pulled down are not cash trees. The farmers see such trees as a menace because the leaves constitute litter. They would rather cut it down and use it for firewood. We decided that if we plant fruit trees, people can sustain themselves with the fruit trees. They can either sell it or in extreme situations, survive on it.
Our last tree planting exercise was in Yola, Adamawa State. Yola is prone to desertification so we focused on planting fruit trees. You would think twice before cutting a Mango tree as opposed to a Neem tree (Dongoyaro tree). The latter covers everywhere with no fruits.
I have a philosophy that no one is perfect and one person can not solve the world’s entire problems. Each time I am not able to deliver on people’s hopes or expectations, I repeat this reality to myself. Plus I have a husband that supports me and plays a part in all the work that I do. At some point in the life of a lady, you are flying like a bird. Once you perch on a particular tree, you either depend on the tree not to fall or to shake you a little so you keep flying. It’s a blessing to have a husband that is both for me.
You need that in this work of hope.
For contributions and donations:
Account number: 0213165605
Account name: Girls for Climate Action Initiative
Bank name: Union Bank.
For Partnerships:
gforclimateaction@gmail.com
