Bianca Ojukwu

Bianca Odumegwu-Ojukwu, the Nigerian Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, has shared how her life trajectory culminating in who she is today.   

Speaking at the Nigerian Women’s Day on the sidelines at the 69th Session of the Commission on the Status of Women at the United Nations headquarters in New York, Bianca, wife of the late Ikemba Nnewi, Dim Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, said that as a young lady, she did not allow her privileged background to distract her.

She highlighted the importance of education in every woman’s life, and disclosed that when she started making money as a beauty queen, there was the temptation to abandon her law programme at the University of Nigeria, Enugu Campus.

“I started off really as a young girl wanting to see the world. I remember sitting in the common room with other young girls always in those days, we would be watching top of the box, the music videos, Miss World, Miss Universe, and always quite impressed with the exotic backdrops more than anything. I just wanted to travel and see the world, and what was the best way of doing that, if not going into a pageant?

“So, I started my journey of going first into a certain pageant, which I won but as a student I couldn’t take the offer that came which included a one-year modelling contract in Tokyo. Of course, my parents didn’t know. They didn’t send me to school to go and take part in a pageant, so, I had to give that up. Until when I now took part in the Most Beautiful Girl in Nigeria, which rendered me homeless for one month because naturally African fathers, my father was livid with rage. But I guess after I had won other pageantries like Miss Africa, Miss Intercontinental and so forth, he had to come to terms with it.

“But the point I’m making is this, one of the hardest things is, when you start earning money quite early, the biggest temptation would be to leave school. By the time I was earning my own money, I was a law student living in the hostel with about six other students with no water, nothing, and then, going back to school to finish my education as a lawyer was quite challenging. But that was one of the best decisions I ever made in my life. I think young women need to understand the power of education,” she advised.

The minister, whose father was a governor in Nigeria, recounted that from pageantry, she moved into advocacy, having founded a nongovernmental organisation called Hope House Trust. 

She said: “We were taking care of juvenile delinquents. From there, I moved on to becoming Presidential Senior Special Assistant on Diaspora Matters, Nigeria’s Ambassador to Spain, Permanent Representative to the United Nations, World Tourism Organisation; and today, Honourable Minister of State for Foreign Affairs.”

Amb. Odumegwu-Ojukwu, who noted that women go through a lot, regretted that most of the time, the limitations that women have are caused by other women.

According to her, women have relegated themselves in African societies to just being praise singers. They form musical groups and applaud men who are going into office, but when women want to go into office, it is hard to get women to vote for them.

She, therefore, called for a change of mindset such that women would not just be cheerleaders but become active participants and players.

“So, I think what we need to do is to start changing that mindset. We have to also appreciate the fact that when you have political parties in other societies, be it in the Conservative Party, in the Labour Party, in the Republican Party, or in the Democratic Party, you don’t have women leaders but in African political parties, you need to have Women Leaders. But you don’t have men leaders and what that says is that we have accepted that we are a segment that needs always to be carried along and I think that mindset needs to change,” the minister said.

She also decried huddles faced by women when they seek elective political positions, particularly when they are either reminded of where they come from or where their spouses hail from.