Osinachi‘s husband has been sentenced to death.
The man who unalived Bamishe has also been sentenced to death.
While it is not wrong for anyone to celebrate the symbolism of these court judgements in the struggle against domestic violence, we must be honest that this is not substantial justice.
Why would anyone think THIS is justice?
A death sentence is not just barbaric to say the least, it is humongously ineffective in the long run. Nobody in their right mind will sign on to it. It is just some distracting over-the-top attempt thrown at women or any other oppressed group to make us think Nigeria cares about women at all.
It solves absolutely nothing.
The death sentence is just another flashy show of violence from a system that feeds off blood and control.
It’s not about justice. It’s about distraction.
The government will execute a man today and ignore every single woman screaming for help tomorrow. That’s not justice. That’s performance. It’s what the state does! The government kills to look powerful, not to protect.
Real justice would mean crushing the very power structures that produce abusers, not killing a few while keeping the factory running.
If Nigeria cares about women;
It will start getting rid of all the various patriarchal laws in the country.
It will start banning misogynistic songs.
It will take care of the fucker currently attacking Natasha and make it known that misogyny and patriarchy are unacceptable, especially in politics.
But patriarchy is woven deeply into the fabrics of our society and you think unaliving one or two men is justice?
You think bloody revolution is justice?
How many of these men and boys are you going to unalive?
When little boys are born right into a consciousness that counts women as nothing?
How much blood do you want to shed?
How much blood is enough?
When do we stop pretending violence is justice just because we feel angry and hurt?
Where should we start from?
Your father and brother and uncle and ozzban?
And there is no difference between us and these people we are trying to kill no matter how much we justify trying to unalive people.
We want healing, not more deaths.
We want change, not another round of bloodshed in the name of safety.
What happened to rehabilitation?
Can that happen in this present prison system that they call ‘correctional’ facilities? The prison system?
It’s a monster in its own right. It swallows people whole and spits them back out worse, angrier, broken.
Especially women – women prisons in Nigeria get less attention when it comes to correctional infrastructures and facilities.
Especially queer people – Bobrisky would not have survived imprisonment if she didn’t have the money to make the corrupt arrangement to serve her time from a serviced apartment.
ESPECIALLY THE POOR – everything you buy in a Nigerian prison is three times as expensive as its cost outside and you can’t protest.
That’s the prison system. It doesn’t fix anything. It doesn’t heal anyone. It doesn’t teach any accountability or stop any harm or correct anything. It just cages people’s pain and lets it rot. And then dumps it right back into society.
People like these men sentenced to death should be in rehabilitation centers, not in prisons or killed.
And not in the kinds of rehabilitation centers we have in Nigeria that makes mental illnesses worse. For real, we need to stop thinking or acting like the government has answers.
Even its so-called “rehabilitation” centres for people with mental illness or survivors of domestic violence are often just prisons with softer paints.
Healing doesn’t come from a government whose structure is built on control and punishment.
It comes from community, from care, from people willing to do the hard, messy work of real accountability.
Not punishment dressed up as therapy.
Not quiet cages with nicer walls!
And it’s not just individuals; we as a society need a holistic rehabilitation.
The media, religious institutions, marriage institutions, the health sector, patriarchy thrives everywhere!
Justice is snuffing out patriarchy never to rise again.
Patriarchy won’t die because we begged the government to kill one or two of its sons. It thrives in the police. It thrives in prisons. It thrives in the death sentence. You can’t use patriarchal tools to destroy patriarchy – it only mutates and comes back stronger!
Just like the title of Audre Lorde’s essay: The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle The Master’s House.
If we want to crush it for good, we need something different. Something deep. Something that builds a world outside this madness.
Unaliving one or two men solves absolutely nothing. It’ll just lead to more chaos. To more barbarism. To more anger, hatred, bloodshed. Who could unalive the other faster and get away with it.
It ensures boys and men keep being raised into people we’d like unalived, both individually and as a society.
How does THAT make sense?
It does NOT make sense!
If the death sentence was an effective solution, best believe the government, the useless Nigerian government especially, will NOT offer it to you.
But here you are being given the illusion that they’re doing something about women.
The Nigerian Government and society as a whole does not care about women. It’s a deeply misogynistic country and offering a few scapegoats is NOT justice or solution to this menace.
It’s unfair trying to condition people that it’s okay to unalive people, justify it and rejoice about it. That’s totally not okay. That’s not fair!
Will the Nigerian Government consistently tell the public that women matter?
Are they scrapping laws that treat women like nothing?
Is the healthcare system on women’s side?
Are they addressing the general insecurity even outside of femicide?
The government will never save us. The system will never save us. It was never built to. It’s killing us slowly while pretending to care.
The death sentence is a smokescreen.
Why is a death sentence the only “solution” the bloodthirsty Nigerian Government is offering us?
There’s something in the air and it smells like bullshit.
Real justice looks like tearing down everything; patriarchy, prisons, police, the laws that hate us, the culture that silences us. And building something alive in its place.
Something rooted in care. In truth. In freedom.
That’s what we deserve. And we’re not asking anymore. We’re taking it!
To learn about very few examples of Nigerian patriarchal laws, you can check this out here.
Dasola Tewogbade writes from Paris and can be reached via this email.
