Ekaete Umoh, President of the Joint National Association of Persons With Disabilities, speaks to PLAC Beam on the body’s challenges, successes and aspirations.
On JONAPWD and its Origins:
This association was founded around 1992. The history actually started from the University of Jos. There were students in University of Jos as at that time who saw that their needs were not being met and were struggling with a lot of challenges that had to do with accessibility and other barriers. They just came together to organize and started talking about how to address the issues before them. It’s been evolving since then. This is like a coalition; it is an umbrella body of all disability organisations in Nigeria. It just speaks and represents the 15 percent of the population of Nigerians with disabilities. We are over 30 million. This organisation speaks on behalf of these people, recognised by the Federal Government itself. We used to be under the Federal Ministry of Women Affairs, not really under, like a supervisory Ministry. But there has been a lot of restructuring. We are now under the Federal Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs, Disaster Management and Social Development. So JONAPWD is a coalition of coalitions.
On JONAPWD’s Clusters:
For now we have like six major clusters. We have the Nigerian Association of the Blind, the Nigerian National Association of the Deaf, the National Association of Persons with Physical Disabilities, the National Association of Persons with Intellectual Disabilities, the Spinal Cord Injury Association and National Association of Persons Affected with Leprosy. Just at our last convention in 2018, we proposed that we should now have the National Association of Youths with Disabilities. We also approved the National Association of Women with Disabilities. So, we still have more clusters to go. Those with invisible disabilities, we’re still asking them to organise because you can’t be our cluster member except you are democratically elected. So, nobody just jumps in and says, I am a member of JONAPWD because we don’t have individual memberships
On JONAPWD’s Vision and Mission:
We want to see a society where equality, social justice and the rights of those with disabilities are guaranteed. We are looking at it from the human rights perspective. We are not giving us bags of rice, pity purpose, trying to patronise us. We want our rights to be guaranteed. That’s out vision and statement so we hope that we can achieve it. We hope we can achieve our vision through collaboration with specific partners and projects and relevant stakeholders. So, we are hoping that we will have a society where equality, social justice and rights of persons with disabilities are guaranteed through specific projects, advocacy and partnership with relevant stakeholders. That’s our guiding mission.
Ekaete Umoh, President of the Joint National Association of Persons With Disabilities
On Their Biggest Success:
I think the self-actualization – that we have been able to find our feet collectively as a community and begin to create the visibility for the rights and issues of persons with disabilities – is one of our biggest achievements. We have been able to engage in a way that everyone, let me say 60% of the society, is beginning to see that disability issues are human rights issues. For us, one of our biggest successes is that we have been able to create a safe space where we can push for the issues of persons with disabilities. So, if I point at a specific thing that we are still celebrating, it is that for the last 17 years collectively, we have pushed and pushed and finally we have a piece of legislation protecting the rights of persons with disabilities. Not just us but also people from the non-disability community who collaborated with us to see that this happened.
On Education and Disability:
Looking at the Universal Basic Education Act we saw a huge gap. Though this Universal Basic Education could be free and compulsory, it wasn’t going to be accessible to everyone because the act did not take into consideration the children with disabilities. In all the investments in schools and all of that, children with disabilities were not able to access those good schools. They were just pushed to the margin to one school for the blind, one school for the deaf, all that institutionalisation. So we said if we must be an enlightened community that can contribute to national development, we must have inclusive education, to ensure that mainstream schools are made accessible so that children with and without disabilities can play and learn together. Children with disabilities can form some kind of social skills that can also lead to some level of social capital; they can relate nicely and contribute to the growth of the nation. So, inclusive education is one project that we have pushed for a very long time. We did that in three states as pilots: Akwa Ibom, FCT and Kwara. I’m so happy to tell you that the FCT policy on inclusive education is ready to go. In a nutshell we are so proud of our inclusive education project that was funded by USAID and still ongoing.
On the Association’s Biggest Challenge:
Well, I will start from when I came in. For a very long time people, including development agencies, didn’t quite see disability as a development issue. They situated the discourse within the charity perspective so if they were talking about development issues, they didn’t see us. They would just mention us when it was time to do social protection and maybe give out charity. That was our biggest challenge. People not understanding the fact that disability issues are human rights and development issues. Because of the lack of this understanding, it was difficult for us to engage. If we wanted to engage those we were engaging were always at a loss. We started educating that this is about human rights.
On the Barriers of Living With Disability:
The challenge has been the disconnect between us and society. We are still pushing to let people understand that the barriers that we face as persons with disabilities are because the society is constructed in, I will say, a one-size-fits-all approach, and so we were not factored into consideration. So, if you ask me what the barriers may be, we classify them into three or four. The general one could be the environmental barrier that everyone knows. We are talking about access access access. As little as access is, it is a very big thing for us because lack of access could also exclude us from effective participation. When I talk of access, we are talking of environmental access, we are looking at buildings that are in a way that wheelchairs cannot access. As basic as that could be, it is going to exclude a lot of people from sitting at the table to discuss issues. Now, I’m a wheelchair user for instance and I’m coming for a meeting and it’s on the second floor and there is no lift, and I am down there, and you are discussing a very important matter. I can’t sit at the table to even contribute. Another level of barrier we may face is institutional barrier. Institutional barriers have to do with the way laws and policies are crafted, omitting disability components. I gave you an example of Universal Basic Education.
So, we are saying that in the design of products and services, we should think about diversity and we will know how to incorporate the concern. It’s the same thing that the youths are shouting about. For youths, it is about the age gap. Women, it is about the gender gap. Then the social barrier is just an attitude which is the most horrible aspect. You know, attitude has to do with perception. Who is she? With all our qualifications, all you can see is the impairment.
On Where the Association Hopes to be in Five Years:
We want to be a clearing house, a strong institution. The voice of persons with disabilities that can sit at a high-level decision-making table; a very strong institution that can negotiate on behalf of persons with disabilities. We want to see visibility in political party participation. In the next five years, it will be nice to have one of us in the House of Representatives. Or the Senate. It would just be great to have a minister of disabilities in this country. I don’t mean a special adviser to the president on disabilities, nothing like that. I’m talking about a full-fledged minister, a commissioner. I want to see a lot of us in strategic places, pushing and negotiating, speaking at decision making tables on behalf of persons with disabilities. I want to see an improved quality of life for us. So, for us as an organisation, a very strong vibrant institution that can negotiate on behalf of persons with disabilities and push for inclusive development. Uppermost in our minds is that we want very very strong institutions, systems and structures that can confidently deliver and negotiate on behalf of persons with disabilities.
To learn more about JONAPWD, visit their website: https://www.jonapwd.org/
Cover Image Credit: PLAC