Wives on strike - The Revolution

SHOWED ON DSTV (ROK) CHANNEL I68 ON 29TH JULY 2020 00.25 AM – 2.00 AM

STARRING OMONI OBOLI, UCHE JOMBO, SHOLA SHOBOWALE AND CHIOMA AKPOTA

RATING (BY ROK) : 95%

The movie takes on the very sensitive and serious issue of domestic violence and tries to put a comical spin on it. It starts with the sober scene of a grieving husband and his children. The dead body of his wife has just been found a block away and there are speculations that she had been at the wrong place at the wrong time. Mama Ngozi (Omoni Oboli), Madam 12:30 (Uche Jombo), Mama Amina (Ufoma McDermott) and Iya Bola (Toyin Abraham) were the dead woman’s neighbour and were on hand to quickly render neighbourly help and took the dead woman’s children away from the depressing scene. Later on they were to discover that the woman had died at the hands of her husband and he had carried and dumped her body a few streets away in order to divert suspicion away from himself. After concluding that the matter is not a police matter, the women decided the best line of action was to invite Shaka, a female vigilante whose job was to adopt some unorthodox means in extracting a confession out of the murderous husband. Shaka abducts the culprit, Baba Beatrice (Chris Iheuwa) and chains him up in her personal detention centre. In the meantime the women at their association meeting decide to embark on a ‘strike’ to call attention to the problem of domestic violence. But this strike is no ordinary strike. They termed it ‘lock up’. They were going to keep their legs closed and deny their husbands of sex.

The producers of Wives on Strike are to be commended for taking on the issue of domestic violence away from the more popular Lekki setting of today. They tried to depict the issue as it affects women in the lower rung of the social ladder. Using a vigilante to coax a confession out of the wife murderer was a pointer to the perceived lack of confidence in the police to come through in cases of domestic violence. The point was also made in the movie that the issue of domestic violence has become so serious that government needed to wade in and begin to tackle the problem. The government responded in the form of a TV broadcast by the governor of the state and the women called off the ‘lock up’ strike. After watching the film the question that comes to my mind is – for any woman in a domestic violence situation, how does this film offer any kind of comfort or succour? Are there any lessons learnt as to how to stop an ongoing domestic violence situation within the home. Does the film suggest any solutions that can be adopted by anyone in a domestic violence situation or is this film once again an example of a Nollywood movie made just for the sake of it.

To begin with, the issue of domestic violence is a very serious and touchy issue that should never be trivialised. There is a pain that comes with knowing that the person who perhaps should cherish you more than anyone else in the world is the one who would raise their hand against you and cause you bodily harm and injury and be totally unapologetic about it. There is also the fear factor ingrained in the hearts of victims against the person of their oppressors. A lot of the time a lot of the sufferers – if they belong to the demographic depicted in the film, cannot pull away from a potentially dangerous situation because they lack the financial muscle to support themselves and have nowhere else to go and so they have to stay in abusive marriages and take the beating. Sometimes children are also involved and they become a factor in any decision a spouse may make. Against this background if there is ANY issue not to trifle with and make a joke out of, domestic violence is the one. This is particularly so in this movie because the movie starts with the tragic death of a woman due to the beating she had received in the hands of her husband. Death is never funny anyhow you look at it yet at the point the women learnt that the blood found at the scene had been confirmed to be the dead woman’s blood, Mama Ngozi found the information hilarious enough to laugh. Another woman, Iyawo Prince, (ChiGurl) was also beaten to stupor by her husband.

To try to tackle this story through the vehicle of comedy was totally inadequate and detracted from the seriousness of the issue being addressed. Even if comedy was going to be used, one would have expected some mild comedy and not the kind of caricature acting, clownish behaviour, bad grammar, vulgar make-up etc. that dominated the production. Personally I thought it was a bit offensive and derogatory to depict people in that demography as clowns and unserious-minded individuals. The truth is that a lot of people in that social strata are facing very serious issues of survival. They are the taxi and bus drivers, mechanics, vulcanizers, traders, low level civil servants and other low income earners. They have busy lives and are trying to get by day to day. After work each day they just want to get home, eat, get some sleep and be up by 4.00am the next morning to commence the routine all over again. Sex is not the most important issue of the day that if their wives decide to ‘lock-up’ they would feel so devastated and deprived that they would immediately begin to grant concessions. Moreover the bitter truth is that there are always more willing ‘alternatives’ just around the corner. So adopting the strategy of denying their husbands of sex as a means of calling attention to the problem at hand was most unrealistic and giving their husbands a ready excuse to cheat. In the meantime the four women who are at the forefront of the so-called ‘revolution’ were all married to good men who were accommodating, understanding and conciliatory. Their husbands didn’t abuse them in any way that made their situation pitiable and to a large extent gave them wings upon which to fly such that they could go to Paris and London as advocates against domestic violence. Mama Ngozi even gets to contest and win a councillor-ship election.

Now the trip to Paris and London is worthy of mention in terms of its relevance to the story being told. Its only essence seems to represent a reward for advocacy work the women were doing and nothing more. It was not even an avenue to talk about the issue as the only scene with the women at the conference in London was the one of Mama Amina telling her listeners that she had stopped a child marriage. It was in the lobby after the conference that they remembered that they had not talked about domestic violence and that they will talk about it when they get to Paris. We never see them at a conference in Paris. So if the movie does not proffer solutions to the problem of abuse or gender discrimination, offer hope or comfort to people in situations of abuse or teach any lessons to the abused, the abusers or the society at large then what exactly is the point of this movie. Seems to me the movie tried to address a valid theme that ended up not being validated.

At their Association meeting to brainstorm on the problem of domestic violence their leader Shola Shobowale promised that they would help all women. So who exactly did they help? No one that was apparent to the viewer. Because none of them was a victim of the cause for which they were fighting. The only person who was able to escape a situation of domestic violence was Iyawo Prince (Chigurl) whom it appears that not getting any clues from her fellow globe-trotting women on how to handle a domestic violence situation decided to help herself when she hit her abusive husband, Prince (Odunlade Adekola) over the head with a pot and he passed out. After that reaction he learnt not to be too quick to raise his hands against her. All in all the women recorded two successes. The first was that the murderous husband bagged a prison term and the second is that Mama Ngozi won an election and became a councilor in the local government.

In spite of the shortcomings, the film does offer some perks. For one it was star-studded with a wide array of Nollywood stars that also included Kalu Ikeagwu, Kenneth Okonkwo, Julius Agwu, Odunlade Adekola, Chioma Chigurl Omeruah, etc. If domestic violence was not so serious an issue, perhaps the efforts of the members of the cast drawn from the comedy genre would have made better sense. All said and done it is important to continue to draw attention to the threat which domestic violence poses to the overall wellbeing of women and every other person in an abusive relationship. On account of this one would still commend the producers of ‘Wives on Strike’ and hope that in subsequent productions, they pay more attention to the main conversation and less to peripheral issues especially if they do not add any entertainment value.

Have you seen this movie? If you have, please drop your comments below.

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