MEN, THIS IS FOR THE WOMEN IN YOUR LIVES

If you have a grandmother, mother, aunt, sister, wife and daughter, you are privileged, cherish them. We find ourselves in a society where our women are endangered species.

We’ve been accustomed to a male dominated world until recently when women began to appeal for more attention. With the achievements of women on the global front, the Nigerian woman is arriving late to the stage. She is still trying to catch up with her contemporaries in Europe, Asia and America.

The reason the women folk have struggled this long is because our men have failed them. Men have been selfish, all attention gabbing and threatening. Until recently, it was considered abnormal for a woman to be goal oriented, visionary and in control of her life. We seem to love our women as housewives whose duties are to prepare our meals and to give us our dose of sex when we feel like it.

Men have chosen to blind their eyes to the original role of women. We feel threatened by the achievements of our girlfriends, wives and sisters who are trying to create a niche for themselves in places where we can’t and are failing. We seemingly want them to be puns, objects we can push at will.

There are reasons to feel sad for womanhood. It seems no matter how hard they try to create an identity for themselves; men still paint in their minds the image of women as sex idols. Certain of the women folk do not help matters; they offer themselves too cheaply to men. This is why a man will have a wife in the house and have series of girlfriends and these girlfriends are aware he has a wife.

Real men love, protect and see their women beyond the kitchen and the bedroom. They see their women as role players, and team players who are playing a different kind of role in their lives that they’d naturally not be able to play for themselves.

Are men the only ones gifted with the capacity to pursue goals? That’s literally how our men have been wired to think. We’ve forced our women to fit into our picture. We think they should be helpers of whatever we choose to do while in reality, they should be pursuing their own goals in support of our own pursuit. Like men, women arrive life with goals that nature has designed to help humanity. Sadly, men do not agree they need help so they push the efforts of women to the background.

Brothers, you are strong, full with talents, goal oriented, ambitious and experienced, but your greatest weakness is the women in your lives. Uncle Adam would have been well informed if he had read this article but he learnt too late after the mistake had been made. If Adam had developed Eve to also be gainfully working with him at what he was doing, Eve wouldn’t have been tempted by the serpent.

Men, develop your women. We develop ourselves too much to the detriment of our women. We want to be everything we can be but leave the training of our wives thinking “who she go help?” Sadly, our women spend more time around the food we eat. An unlearned woman is more harmful than a nuclear bomb.

Holler to the men folk for giving our women the impression that they cannot do without men. But you are wrong and have always been wrong but the women have never had reasons to doubt where men have put them.

Society will continue to suffer from the irresponsibility of men to take responsibility for women. If we continue to relegate our women to the background and choose to farm alone, when you’d be no more as the statistics often show, they’d have to farm for themselves and you leave them with too much to worry about.

Men are the products of women. Women shape our thoughts early in life, they mold us, they bend us. Our fathers thought it was unmanly to hang around their baby sons growing up. We learnt our “mother tongue” yet we put no importance to how our mothers think. We’d be running around circles.

Men, it’s time to fight for your women. They have struggled to attract attention to all their struggles. They have produced generals in the army, statesmen, engineers, lawyers, doctors, and technocrats, all of them men who failed to represent them well.

You call yourself a man and you think the greatest good you can do to a woman is to rape her. You are literally insane. You probably are not aware that you too will produce women through your loins whose destiny you are raping by your act of rape.

Women should be everything and anything they can be. The best of your wife or girlfriend isn’t when she sleeps with you. It is when she does the best she can do to compliment the best you are doing. If you can write, teach her to write, if you can sing, get her to sing too. Create a team with the women in your life. Our women are heavily talented, don’t despise them.

The women in your lives deserve more than your house, food, money and convenience. That’s not why they are around you. They are around you to compliment how much you can do so that you can do more.

The help you need from your woman is dependent on how much knowledge you have invested in her. Expand her knowledge base, send her to school, help her discover her talents. If you don’t help her, she probably will be the reason you’d fall from your high pedestal.

Every woman is not a competition, she is a supporter. If she is doing her best, it’s because she is helping out the best way she should. Celebrate her.