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Resources > Global Issues > Nigeria – Traff... > Background on Tra... > Going Internation...

Going International: WOCON

The task of taking the message against trafficking from Nigeria to the international community has been assumed by Olabisi Olateru-Olagbegi, Executive Director of the Women's Consortium of Nigeria (WOCON). It is a task for which she is well suited, by background, profession, and personality.


Olabisi Olateru-Olagbegi.

Her great-grandfather was a king (paramount chief, also known as Oba) in Oshun state. Her husband is a king in Ondo state. Their authority is vested in her, indiscernible to outsiders but evident to Nigerians. This, and her connections, gives her extraordinary access to senior government officials.

Bisi Olateru-Olagbegi is the perfect partner for the more reticent activists like the Catholic sisters of Benin City, who are happy to work in the shadows. They shun publicity; she loves it. She is also ready to take risks. She was one of those who protested the illegal execution of Ken Sarowiwa by the military government of the late President "Sonny" Abacha. She also led a march on the Belgian embassy in October 1998 after a young Nigerian woman, Semira Adamu, was suffocated to death by a Belgian policeman during her deportation from Brussels.

Bisi needs all of her resolve in the fight against trafficking. She had a taste of the risks recently when she went to Lagos airport to meet two girls who returned from Europe. They found the traffickers also waiting for the girls. Bisi and Sister Regina confronted the traffickers and rescued the girls. But the traffickers followed them back to Lagos.

This was unnerving, but such things come with the territory. The fight against trafficking is not for the faint of heart.

Respect for law runs deep in Bisi's family. Her father was a high court judge in Lagos. She herself graduated from law school in Lagos and was called to the bar in 1976. She is currently in a private practice that pays the bills for her human rights work and the Women's Consortium of Nigeria (WOCON), which she founded in 1994.

She first became engaged in human rights through law in 1977, when she helped to uncover a major discrepancy in the Nigerian tax code under which male heads of households, but not women, were allowed to benefit from a tax exemption. Together with other women lawyers, Bisi started writing letters to tax officials and MPs. They got the code changed.

She joined the Nigerian branch of the International Federation of Women Lawyers (FIDA) in the early 1980s. FIDA campaigned for Nigerian ratification of CEDAW, the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women.

It was fitting that her organization in Nigeria emerged from Bisi's international networking. She was a founding member of the Nigerian branch of the Women in Law and Development in Africa (WILDAF), a regional grouping established in 1990 in Zimbabwe to build on the achievements of the U.N. Decade on Women. As the Nigerian coordinator of WILDAF for the last three years, she has used the organization to develop women's civil society.

Membership in FIDA and WILDAF has given Bisi a reputation in the African women's movement, and she was able to extend this to the United Nations in June 1998 at the plenipotentiary conference in Rome to create an international criminal court. Bisi was a prominent member of the NGO women's caucus, which succeeded in getting a gender perspective into the statute of the new court. (It was here that she met the Advocacy Project.) 

Bosse of WOCON: the poster against trafficking was designed by WOCON.

Fighting trafficking is the perfect vehicle for a person of Bisi's talents, and the network she has created. It is a key issue in one of Africa's key countries at a key time in the struggle for women's rights. And Bisi is just the right person to put it on the international agenda. It challenges her as a woman, a mother, a lawyer, and an advocate.

The lawyer in Bisi objects to any contract that relies on duress. Bonded labor is, to her, one of the ultimate abuses. In spite of this, she does not feel that laws are necessarily the best or only solution. She is particularly wary about calling for prosecution to be declared a crime. As well as being unenforceable, she feels that this would criminalize the victim, force the practice underground, and-like abortion-increase the risk of abuse.

"If you want to use your body there should be laws to protect you from abuse. It's the harassment and slave-like conditions that need to be criminalized."

Bisi the mother has four children, two of them girls in their early twenties, and she cannot imagine what it must be like to learn that a daughter has been sucked into prostitution in a far-off country. "I would die. I would feel so empty and sad." The threat from HIV-AIDS adds a new and ominous dimension. It is every parent's worst nightmare to watch helplessly as a child engages in destructive behavior. Prostitution is as risky as it can get.

WOCON took up the issue of trafficking in 1997 at the request of the U.N.'s rapporteur on violence against women. Bisi and Grace Osakwe jointly authored a report on trafficking, which revealed the practice to be far more widespread that they had previously thought.

WOCON's members met and decided to launch a campaign. "There was a lot we did not understand," recalls Bisi. Like a growing number of Nigerian campaigners, Bisi took it on herself to visit some of the women while she was in Rome for the conference on a criminal court. "You could tell the ones who were abused," she says. "They looked so shifty. It was very strange."

In WOCON, Bisi has fashioned a vehicle for her own unique brand of advocacy. In its own way, WOCON is also a perfect example of women's civil society in countries that are emerging from a prolonged crisis. Its equivalent is to be found in Kosovo, Cambodia, Guatemala, and Bosnia.

Like AWEG and IRRRAG, WOCON illustrates the flexibility of women's civil society and the effortless way it coalesces around a cause. Last year it might have been elections. This year it could be trafficking. 

Toyin, a lawyer working with WOCON.

WOCON has a core group of (25) individual members who each contribute 500 Naira ($5) a year. Eleven women's organizations are affiliated. But WOCON's real strength lies in its extended family of friends, colleagues, and partners, who drift in and out depending on the issue. They are formidably determined, and in this they reflect the outsized personality of WOCON's founder.

Bisi's great success lies in having persuaded others to buy into her vision. Once they have set their sights on something, they can put up with astonishing amounts of incompetence and discomfort. Press statements get printed in the middle of an electricity blackout, speeches get written, conferences get launched. In 1999 WOCON completed five quite complicated and demanding projects for five distinct (and demanding) donors.

In our view, Bisi Olateru-Olagbegi and WOCON are at their strongest when advocating. They showed it again in the summer of 2000, when Bisi flew to New York to attend the Beijing Plus Five conference. The meeting was called to review progress on implementing the agenda on women adopted five years earlier at Beijing, and Bisi plunged into a series of briefings and meetings. Many feel she helped to toughen the language on trafficking that emerged in the eventual conference document.

Following this, she visited Washington and met with members of the U.S. Congress and White House Task Force on Trafficking. Once again, her formidable powers of persuasion were on display.

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