This was the first year Nigeria participated in the Winter Olympics, with teams competing in bobsleigh and skeleton. In fact, the Games, which concluded this weekend, had the largest African representation in history.
But that feat won’t be repeated at the upcoming Winter Paralympics, the corollary for athletes with disabilities that starts next week. Not a single African country will participate.
This might not be shocking, considering Nigeria’s Olympians had to crowd fund and gain corporate sponsorship to get to Pyeongchang, South Korea. Nigeria doesn’t invest enough in sports — even less so in athletes with disabilities.
Nigerian Paralympic Champion Lucy Ejike, who set three world records in powerlifting at the 2016 Summer Paralympics, knows her country’s indifference all too well. “The lack of government funding has meant training equipment and facilities for Paralympians are dilapidated,” she says.
It’s part of a larger disregard for Nigerians with disabilities.
Ejike, who was afflicted with polio as a child, is one of over 25 million Nigerians living with a physical disability, many of whom face discrimination, abuse, poverty, and limited access to both employment and public spaces. “In university, getting to my lectures with crutches was difficult as there were no elevators,” recalls the athlete. “I had to climb up a two-story building every day.”
The World Report on Disability estimates that 16 percent of the world is living with a disability. That prevalence is higher in developing countries (18 percent) than wealthier countries (12 percent), where factors like poverty, poor healthcare, natural disasters, malnutrition, and conflicts increase the likelihood.
Determined to improve their lot, Nigerians with disabilities aren’t waiting for others to discover the difficulties they face. They’re demanding that their human rights be recognized, and perhaps more radically, they’re recasting themselves as powerful and capable members of society.
Tobiloba Ajayi, Lawyer and Cerebral Palsy Activist
“I did face stigma because of cerebral palsy,” says Toiloba Ajayi, a lawyer and disability rights activist. “The question is, how many examples do you want?” For Ajayi, rude stares, curious questions, and judgments about her mental faculties are routine.
She remembers a pre-admission interview at a university where panelists assumed she was in the wrong place. “They said, ‘Really, I don’t think you’ll survive the semester.’ I remember looking [them] in the face and saying, ‘Watch me.’”
Five years later, Ajayi would graduate from that same university with a law degree — but not without incident. Her first two weeks were characterized by students gawking as she exited her dormitory, with some gossiping in Yoruba, a language they didn’t know she understood.
“One thing I learned is as [Nigerians] what we do not understand, we would stigmatize,” she says. “We are not raised to ask questions.”
She credits her steeliness to fielding questions about her disability from an early age. At age 3, Ajayi couldn’t sit, stand, use her hands, or walk. Her parents didn’t think she was capable of school but an administrator convinced them to let her try.
Once she started, she says she quickly picked up the missing motor skills by mimicking her classmates.
Ajayi was one of several lawyers who drafted the Lagos State’s Special People’s Law, the first state in Nigeria to pass a disability law. Enacted in 2011, it criminalizes discrimination against people with disabilities and stipulates that newly-constructed, state-owned establishments and large government buses make provisions for wheelchairs.
Currently, Ajayi runs the Let CP Kids Learn, which promotes inclusive education in Nigerian schools and offers counseling to parents of children with cerebral palsy.
“For me, [inclusive education] is about life skills,” she says. “A child who has always been in special education won’t integrate into the real world because the real world isn’t filled with people with disabilities [and] does not make provisions for their differences.”
Cobhams Asuquo, Singer, Songwriter and Producer
Born blind, Asuquo learned at an early age that being disabled in Nigeria comes with complications. “Accessing braille material was a huge, huge, huge challenge,” says Nigerian musician Asuquo. “I remember at the time the standard new general mathematics text book which was being sold for 350 naira; the braille copy of the same textbook sold for 10,000 naira (US$28).”
But he says a timely intervention by Nigerwives Braille Book Production Centre, an association founded by foreign women married to Nigerians that Asuquo works with, lowered the price of the braille copies after they began reproducing them.
In university, where braille texts weren’t available, he had to rely on some empathetic students to dictate entire textbooks. “Obviously, the school wasn’t responsive,” he says. “Just a few lecturers were progressive enough to take a chance with us and allow us submit our responses on CDs and diskettes.”
Today, Asuquo is well-known for writing and producing songs for Nigerian singer Asa. He also served as a judge on Nigeria’s Project Fame. And like his idol Stevie Wonder, he sings and plays the piano.
“The value of [my] career is being a voice [and] an example of what a blind person can be,” he says. “As a nation we’re missing out on the value [people with disabilities] can add, just because we’re not creating an enabling environment for them to thrive.”
David Anyaele, Businessman and Disability Advocate
Anyaele became a disability activist after Sierra Leonean warlords hacked off his hands while he was on business in the country. Overnight his life changed: his fiancée abandoned him, tasks such as writing and eating became impossible without assistance, and people’s reaction swung from pity to repulsion.
Eager to regain some independence, Anyaele sought to procure prosthetic limbs from Germany. But they cost 5 million naira (US$13,850 today), which he couldn’t afford. After trying and failing to get financial help from the local government, well-wishers eventually helped him raise the money.
Anyaele is now the executive director of the Centre for Citizens with Disabilities, a nongovernmental organization he founded in 2002. Part of his time is spent advocating for the passage of a national disability bill, which is ping-ponging through government — a sign, disability activists believe, of an apathetic government. This is ten years after Nigeria ratified the United Nations Convention on Rights of People with Disabilities.
Asked why the disability bill hasn’t been signed yet, Anyaele blamed the media’s depiction of people with disabilities as one-dimensional charity cases.
“The media address disability issues as charity,” he says. “When you have a government whose response to disability is based on charity, on using people with disabilities to mop up sympathy votes to win elections, and thereafter dumping them, this is what you get.”
One thing that Ajayi, Asuquo and Anyaele agree on is that they’re not interested in sympathy votes. They just want their country’s government and institutions to offer them basic human dignities. After all, the Paralympic Games in Rio proved that people with disabilities can — if given the chance —break world records and bring home 12 medals.
