This is the final part of a four-part series commemorating International Women’s Day 2018written by Charles O. Anyiam-Osigwe and Michael Igaga
We have noted in this series the efforts of the United Nations to situate womanhood in its appropriate status in the social order. In its efforts, a significant stride was made through the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms Of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) in 1979. CEDAW, however, was limited to the dimension of saving the woman from male domination in domestic violence and other forms of abuses that denigrated the woman.
With Resolution 1325 adopted by the UN Security Council in 2000, the United Nations acknowledged the genius of the woman to deliver in certain aspects of our social challenges in the evolvement of a better world order.
However, we note that the United Nations must transcend the subjective analysis and appraisal of the woman and womanhood. Drawing from the treatises of Emmanuel Onyechere Osigwe Anyiam-Osigwe in the work titled Women as the Salt of the Earth, the correct perspective to the issue of gender must draw from the ontological dimension that situates being and consciousness. From that perspective, he argues that we must appreciate that there is a primal cause in creation. That primal cause whether is a bang or a being is the cause that was not preceded by any other cause and could be situated as divinity as it continues to affect all other subjective causes in a continuum. Within the compass of the first cause is the operational expression of the law of opposites, the negative and the positive, the passive and the active. It also manifests as the feminine and the masculine.
It is within the context of this duality that divinity manifest in substantiality. It is within the context of the substantiality of divinity that the divine finds expression as the first cause. Without the feminine integral, therefore, divinity is not only incomplete, it becomes prostrate, castrated and impossible to manifest itself in a creative dimension.
It is within this context that the utility and absoluteness of the woman is best situated and appreciated. From the existential dimension, the woman is an integral aspect of the creative process and, in fact, underpins the intellect and power of the creation process. The world has, in its negation, submerged the genius of the woman and denied the social order of the genius of womanhood which remains a fundamental resource to be recognised and applied in the achievement of a better world order.
Charles O. Anyiam-Osigwe is the Co-ordinator General of the Osigwe Anyiam-Osigwe Foundation and Michael Igaga is the Administrative Secretary of the Foundation.