By: Mohamed Sahr
National Sowei Council in collaboration with Traditional Women Leaders and other women’s wing has called on the Bio’s-led administration to ensure their protection against Anti-FGM campaigners on Friday during a press conference at OBASAI Hall in Freetown.
Dr. Sia Fuambai Ahmadu, Chief Executive of Sierra Leone Women are Free to Choose (SLWAFC) thanked President Bio for his steadfast commitment and advancing the course of women and girls in the country particularly with regards to the enactment of Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment Bill which provides thirty percent (30%) quota for women’s participation in governance and decision making processes.
She mentioned that the Bondo otherwise ‘Sandei’ society serves as a historic national convention that binds together over three thousand sowies and leaders across the nation. “We want to inform the public that the position imposed by the international community, Civil Society Organizations and Anti-FGM campaigners’ towards the hard-earned initiation practices is demeaning,” she said.
Madam Fuambai Ahmadu called on President Bio to ensure their safety against Anti-FGM campaigners; adding that both the male and female circumcision have the same meaning and purpose in the front mirror of Sierra Leone’s tradition. She said the Bondo and ‘Sandei’ did not practice genital mutilation but had their own ways in showcasing the traditional values that surrounds it. “The same female genital procedures that western doctors imitate from circumcised women which they now rebrand as labiaplasty, clitoroplasty and all sorts of medical names for the benefit of white women and their teenage daughters, Dr. Ahmadu said.
She affirmed that despite the lack of evidence of negative health consequences of female circumcision compared with uncircumcised women and the fact that mostly well-educated and wealthy women are enjoying the same procedures, western feminists continued to influence the United Nations, Africa Union through the well-founded NGOs to brand circumcision as sexual disfigured and dysfunctional victims of patriarch.
Dr. Ahmadu urged the government and other institutions that they do not practice FGM that which was enforced in the Maputo Protocol or Convention on the right for the elimination of all discrimination against women.
She admonished the Bio-led administration to help them in order to uphold the practices that their ancestors originated that which they replicated the same.
