GENDER-EQUALITY BILL RAISES CONCERNS

Concerns have been raised over a public hearing which may soon be held for a recently proposed  bill on gender equality before it is passed by the lawmakers.

According  to reports, Florian  Plaucheur of the BBC writes that  a prominent Muslim cleric, Sheikh Isyaka Rabiu in Nigeria has warned Muslim lawmakers that they will be condemned as "unbelievers" if they back a new gender equality bill claiming that the bill which proposes that men and women inherit an equal share, violates the Koran.

For a long time now, gender activists have been pushing for the bill to end discrimination against women in a country with roughly the same number of Christians and Muslims.

On the other hand however, Reverend Musa Asake, the secretary of the West African state's main Christian group, the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), told the BBC's Hausa service that he did not find anything wrong with the bill because in "Christianity inheritance is shared equally between male and female".

It will be recalled that the senate has already rejected an earlier version of the bill in March, saying that it was incompatible with Nigerian culture and religious beliefs.

The BBC's Muhammad Kabir Muhammad in the capital, Abuja, says the new bill has been sponsored by a female senator, and is a watered-down version of the rejected Gender and Equal Opportunity Bill.

Nevertheless, the report says that, the bill is still facing strong resistance from Muslim groups, including the influential Tijjaniya Brotherhood of which Sheikh Rabiu is a leader.

Sheikh told the BBC that whoever approves of the bill “is an unbeliever, not Muslim" and went ahead to appeal to all muslim senators never to the bill’s passage into law and added that if it is passed “we are going to tell all Nigerian Muslims not to accept it”.

Gender rights activists say the bill will help eliminate discrimination against women even as Muslim Senator Ubali Shitu said the bill still needed to go through various stages before it would be voted on.

Lawmakers would only approve "those aspects that are beneficial and throw out those that we deem harmful" said Ubali.

Human rights activist Bukky Shonibare had called the rejection of the bill in March a sad day for Nigerian women and said it showed "how backward we are".