Bisi Adeleye-Fayemi

August 12th was International Youth Day. It was a day to celebrate the world’s youth, and review progress made on promises to provide them with education, employment and leadership opportunities around the world. In many African countries, our youth demographic is the largest. Yet they continue to waste away due to a dearth of comprehensive measures to keep them engaged and productive. In spite of the many challenges however, our youth continue to do us proud with their resilience and ingenuity in the face of unspeakable odds.

I am not one to rain on the ‘hustle’ of young people as they like to call it. It is a hard world out there and survival is key. Many ‘hustles’ have paid off and have seen our young people eminently successful in a wide range of areas – academia, technology, entertainment, fashion, agriculture to mention a few. I would however like to focus on one particular hustle that has been around for a long time. It is the world of beauty pageants. In the interest of full disclosure, let me state upfront that I have always disliked beauty pageants. I have always found the idea of a line of young, pretty women strutting across a stage to be judged on subjective standards of beauty quite distasteful.

However, I have accepted the fact that it is a way for young women to acquire fame, riches and other opportunities. Some even manage to attract wealthy ‘admirers’ and even a husband. Winning a beauty pageant opens doors, and the attention can be ploughed into other dreams the lucky girl might have. The same way in which I have never understood why two adults would want to box their brains out to the loud cheers of others, I accept that one person’s meat is another person’s poison.

Beauty pageants in Nigeria used to be a very classy affair. The participants all looked natural in their various shapes and sizes. The sponsors all seemed respectable – Daily Times sponsored Miss Nigeria for a long time, till they were edged out by the Silverbird Group with their Most Beautiful Girl in Nigeria (MBGN) contests. I remember when I was a student at the University of Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University) in the early eighties. Ms Helen Prest won Miss Nigeria in 1979, and she was still on campus during my time. We used to stare at her in awe, she had such beauty, grace and poise. She looked and acted every inch the beauty queen, and she still looks great today.

When women break any kind of barrier to become successful, there are always insinuations or whispers about how she got there, who she knew, slept with, was related to and so on. The world of beauty pageants has always been awash with these assumptions, but by and large, the whole affair seemed pretty innocuous. And then Agbani Darego went from being Most Beautiful Girl in Nigeria (2001) to Miss World (2001), and the world of beauty pageants in Nigeria changed – and not for the better. In spite of my reservations about beauty pageants, I was thrilled when Agbani Darego won her title. Not only had she done her country proud, she would be guaranteed many opportunities in modelling, fashion, philanthropy and so on. When she won, it was as if thousands of Nigerian girls saw themselves as the next Agbani, and yearned for the charmed life she had been blessed with.

A new crop of mostly unscrupulous opportunists latched on to the dreams of these girls and have now turned the beauty pageant industry in Nigeria into a royal mess. Unlike in the early years of the Miss Nigeria and MBGN contests, pageant participants are promised juicy prizes, but hardly ever get them. What happens these days is that organisers sell forms to contestants. The proceeds from the contestants’ fees are used to organize a third rate event in a dingy venue. After the ‘winner’ has been chosen, she finds out to her dismay that the prize she has been promised is not available. How do I get it? She asks. She is told that she has to go round to ‘greet’ the sponsors. When I was First Lady of Ekiti State, I met with two beauty queens who had won prizes in their respective competitions. They both had the same story to tell. They had been promised prizes, but after the contest, they were told to go round the sponsors to ‘remind’ them of their promise. Since when did it become the responsibility of the contestants to arrange their own prizes? I was of course very upset at the blatant exploitation of these girls, but in the absence of guidelines to protect the rights of contestants, there is very little that can be done.

There is also another feature that has emerged over the past couple of years. Beauty Queens have always been expected to carry out charitable duties. However, these days, Instead of supporting existing philanthropic programs which abound all over the place, the Queens are pushed by the organisers of the pageants to set up ‘Pet Projects’. The Queens, many of whom are supposed to be in school or learning a skill, are then forced to do the rounds of corporate bodies, seeking financial support for their schemes. A beauty queen who won a regional contest a few years ago told me about how she was almost raped in the office of one of the men she had gone to seek a donation from.

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http://abovewhispers.com/2016/08/17/loud-whispers-miss-miss/

Bisi Adeleye-Fayemi is a Gender Specialist, Social Entrepreneur and Writer. She is the Founder of Abovewhispers.com, an online community for women. She can be reached at [email protected]