April 22, 2019

Gambia's women deserve more than democracy

located:	Gambia
editor:	Bob Koigi

In an ironic unfolding of events in Gambia, former iron-fisted ruler, Yahya Jammeh, banned female genital mutilation (FGM) in 2015, as he sought to protect the health and dignity of women and girls. At the time, an estimated 75 percent of women between the ages of 15 and 49 had undergone the female genital cut, in one of the most staggering numbers the world over.

The penalties for engaging in the practice were stiff, at about $1,050 or 3 years in prison—or both—but it is the power President Jammeh wielded, and the fear he instilled in those who opposed him that discouraged the vice to a great extent.

When President Adama Barrow took office in 2017, after defeating Jammeh, the place and space of democracy in the West African nation was deeply entrenched, and celebrated globally. But with it came the reversal of the hard-earned gains in the war on female circumcision, in a worrying trend that activists and lawmakers have warned poses a great threat to the future of young girls.

Proponents of the practice argue that any law that the former ruler had instituted is now null and void. The government of Mr. Barrow has been vague by neither condemning nor issuing an official government stand on the issue. 

This has emboldened the advocates of FGM, who invoke religion and tradition to support the exercise. Girls as young as five months are now subjected to the cut as their parents seek to fulfil what has predominantly been seen as a rite of passage that discourages premarital sex and unwanted pregnancies.

As the debate rages on, and daggers get drawn between pro and anti-FGM camps, evidence of lifelong bodily harm, deaths and complications during birth by those who undergo female circumcision should guide any debate and jolt government to action.

Gambia has been the poster child for mutilation of women bodies done even to children, with no say or idea of the effects to the rest of their lives. The world should rise up and call it for what it is: a crime against women and an affront to their dignity which deserves to be criminalised.

Photo ©UNICEF