Do you know who Obianuju Ekeocha is?

If you don’t, it is time to get acquainted with her.

Obianuju Ekeocha is a pro-life campaigner for the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, is the founder and president of Culture of Life foundation, a self-professed advocate for women has dedicated her life to fighting against African women having access to contraception because apparently African women don’t ‘want’ contraception. Ekeocha has become popular enough that she has started to attract attention from mainstream press for her statements and campaigning that African countries be denied access to contraception. She was recently granted an interview by the BBC where she was asked to speak on her work fighting to deny African women access to contraception and here is what she had to say.

Here’s the thing with women like Obianuju Ekeoha, women who spend their lives conflating their personal beliefs and religious inclinations as the needs of all women.

Ekeocha is a Catholic, and Catholicism has long denied women access to contraception because it is in violation with the LOVE to pretend to speak for all African women, profess to know what the average African woman needs. It is mind-boggling that Ekeocha, who lives in a first world country with access to some of the best reproductive healthcare (including contraception) believes that women do not deserve access to contraception because they don’t ‘want’ healthcare. She goes as far as suggesting that offering women access to contraception and abortion is a form of colonialism?

What?!

First off, Mrs. Ekeocha is an incredibly privileged woman who refuses to acknowledge that her privilege has afforded her financial independence and the ability to pursue a formal education without being pressured to marry anyone and raise children as a way to remove her family from poverty. This is the actual lived experience for many, many African women. The choice of when a woman can reproduce, who she chooses to reproduce with and if she wants to reproduce or not are often decisions that made for women by the intensely patriarchal societies in which they find themselves. And it is incredibly selfish and myopic for Ekeocha force her religious opinions on other women.

Ekeocha says that women need food and water and education, yet there is NO record anywhere of her challenging the governments of Africa to properly allocate their national budgets towards strengthening access to basic amenities and education. In case we all forgot, it is not the job of international aid agencies to provide basic amenities to countries with sovereign governments and sizable GDP’s. In Nigeria alone, Dieziani Madueke stole 2 billion dollars, in two years from the Nigerian government. Ekeocha has NEVER condemned this theft and lamented how that wasted money could have provided millions with potable water, electricity and education. Instead she chooses to target international aid agencies providing much needed reproductive health aid as a way to feel better for herself.

In many ways, Obianuju Ekeocha mirrors many of the religious idols of Catholicism. Especially Mother Theresa. Mother Theresa spent her entire life advocating that suffering and poverty was the right way to find God and denying modern medicine for the people of India by suggesting that the average Indian didn’t want or need modern medicine. However, when she was dying, she was quick to take all the palliative care that modern medicine could offer. Obianuju lives in the UK because it has better amenities and palliative care, better opportunities for medical tenure and affords her opportunity to hold her myopic and selfish beliefs and enforce them on African women who have no opportunity to speak for themselves.

As with all charlatans, she will eventually be exposed.

Until then, Obianuju, you can take your opinions on contraception and abortions and keep them to yourself.