Victoria Ajiboye was in an abusive relationship for two years. She suffered an accident a few months after her wedding, in August 2020, which left her in a wheelchair. Her husband never accepted her condition. “He told me that he never thought his wife would be disabled, and she left me alone. Sometimes she would leave home for three days, without looking back,” she says, crying. “There was one day when he came back drunk and had sexual relations with me by force. Although I became pregnant in the process, I lost the pregnancy as a result of stress and depression.” Finally, Ajiboye's husband boxed up all of her wife's belongings and kicked her out, warning her not to return. She returned to her family's house. Now, she hopes that in the future, a responsible man will ask for her hand in marriage.
Victoria is one of the 29 million Nigerians living with some type of disability in this country, according to the latest data from the World Health Organization (WHO), from 2018, which esteem that more than one billion people around the world have some type of disability, and the number is increasing. More than 80% of these people live in developing countries, where they face challenges such as discrimination in their communities, abuse or lack of access to education — 90% of children with disabilities in countries of socioeconomic level under they cannot go to school, according to UNESCO—. Nigeria, with more than 200 million inhabitants, is the largest in sub-Saharan Africa, with 43% of the population under 14 years of age, according to UN Habitatthe United Nations agency for Human Settlements.
Haleem Adeoti has managed to get to university, an exceptional case in a country with approximately 1% of the university population, according to figures from local media. But the disability makes it difficult for him to pursue higher education. He has been on a tortuous academic journey at the University of Ibadan since 2018, when he lost a leg in a road accident. He lives in a university residence in the same building, but, with his crutches, he has to climb 32 steps just to get water to bathe. “This is my third year at university, but I have never visited the library,” Adeoti explains. “There is no ramp for wheelchairs. Every time I consider going, I count the number of stairs that lead to the reading room and, for someone like me, trying is like a punishment.”
A law that is not applied
Nigeria has a Discrimination Law against Persons with Disabilities, approved by former President Muhammadu Buhari in 2019, but, in practice, the group complains that their rights are not respected.
Quadri Adesola, Director of the Caroline Initiative, a non-governmental organization that ensures the well-being of disabled people, regrets the neglect by the Nigerian authorities: “They are not given priority. They are forced to queue at banks, markets and other public spaces to transact business. Some out-of-school children, who take their blind or crippled parents to beg, also face all kinds of abuse, including sexual assault. “We are working with the Government to ensure these children have access to special schools so they can compete with their peers whose parents are healthy.”
The law on the rights of people with disabilities requires, for example, that all buildings open to the public have accessibility aids, such as ramps, handrails and elevators, but this rarely happens. This October, Stephen Augustine, a mobility-impaired civil servant who uses a wheelchair, visited a commercial bank in the Ojodu Berger area of Lagos, Nigeria's economic capital, to obtain a new debit card. There he undertook a tortuous journey from the ground floor of the building, which lacked a ramp, to the third floor.
“The security agent had to carry me on his shoulder to customer service, after waiting for a long time,” he remembers. It is not uncommon, other Nigerians with disabilities agree: often, in poorly accessible buildings, staff have to carry them like babies, or they are forced to crawl on the floor. “The hardships I went through that day forced me to stop having a bank account. It was embarrassing,” Augustine continues. Although mobile banking applications allow the customer to carry out various banking transactions without having to go to banks in person, other problems often arise. “None of the banking applications have a say in off to tell us what to do, which makes it difficult to carry out transactions independently,” details Mubin Alimi, a visually impaired lawyer. “Some unscrupulous people can take advantage of us when we try to ask them for help when using the apps,” he says. “Also, we don't have voice-enabled ATMs. We hope that a disabled counter will be created to serve us. We have made several efforts, in vain.”
Difficult access to justice
There are difficulties in living with disabilities in many other areas, such as justice. This is the case of Lanre Adebayo, a visually impaired lawyer at the Lagos State Ministry of Justice. “In 2013, I was in the Lagos State Magistrates Court in Igbosere, defending my client in a rape case,” he recalls. “When the prosecutor presented a medical report about the incident, I couldn't read it, much less know the details. Later I begged the court to allow the clerk to help me. When he did so, we discovered that the name of the alleged rape victim on the document was different from the matter we were dealing with in court,” he notes. “We also discovered that the date on the medical report did not correspond to the day and date of the incident my client was accused of. I had to use this information to question the doctor who brought the report and we discovered that it was a mere conspiracy against my client. It would have been a case of miscarriage of justice if I had not implored the clerk to read the document aloud.”
Adebayo knows that he is not the only one who has suffered this type of irregularities in the Nigerian justice system. “Courts are not designed in a way that lawyers can bring their personal assistant into court to help them read a document. In fact, the space in the courts is not enough for lawyers, much less to allow a third party to help verify their documents.”
Deaf lawyers also do not have the means to defend their cases in court. Daniel Onwe, president of the Association of Lawyers with Disabilities, emphasizes: “We have a law that protects people with disabilities. Now we must focus on its application. “We must take into account the deaf, the blind, people who use wheelchairs… It is quite embarrassing to see a person with a disability carried in his arms or crawling up the stairs in public spaces.”
The executive secretary of the National Commission for Persons with Disabilities, James Lalu, has threatened to seal facilities and organizations that do not comply with Nigeria's accessibility laws, four years after the accessibility law was passed. “It is no longer an option for organizations to comply with accessibility laws, because we will enforce them. You will see our compliance and enforcement officers visiting your offices,” Lalu threatens.
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