Triumph Of The Fair Sex
Tempo
OPINION
January 12, 2001
Seidi Mulero
Lagos
By successfully shoving Alberto Fujimori out of power in Peru, Susanna
Higuchi once again raises the question of whether women are not more
responsible managers than men.
By giving Alberto Fujimori political asylum, the government of Japan is
aiding and abetting crime," said the protesters in front of the Japanese
embassy in Lima, Peru, last week. Earlier, it was Susanna Higuchi Fujimori's
ex-wife who told an Italian journalist. Yes. I was expecting my husband to
run away because he is a coward, a man who boasts like a balloon when he
wins and hides when he loses." Yes. I hate him. How can it be otherwise? He
tried to get me killed, spied on me and locked me up in the presidential
palace for four years and I could not go out."
President Fujimori had, on 13 November 2000, left Peru for Japan; on 20
November, he sent his resignation letter to Valentin Paniagua, the Congress
President. A day later, the Congress met and after a heated debate, rejected
his resignation and impeached him on the ground of "moral incapacity." So
ended the odyssey for Alberto Fujimori, whose tenure (1990-2000) was one of
the most eventful in the Latin America of the 20th century. He brought down
inflation rate from about 7,000 per cent in 1990 to less than four per cent
in 2000 and successfully deregulated the whole economy. More than that, he
also successfully annihilated two of Latin America's most dreaded guerrilla
movements, the "Sandero Luminoso" (Shining Path) and the Tupac Amaru. When
in April 1997, Fujimori donned a bullet-proof vest, led a commando to storm
the Japanese embassy in Lima the Peruvian capital and killed the 14
guerrilla fighters that had held more than 60 persons hostage in the embassy
for nearly four months, he was on top of the world. And having thus ensured
both economic and political stability to Peru, he invited investors all over
the world to come and invest in the country; they responded positively.
Fujimori equally achieved unprecedented "successes" at the institutional
level: In 1992, he dissolved the National Assembly, suspended the
Constitution and gave himself extraordinary powers. He repeated the feat in
1996 by successfully amending the Constitution to give himself a third term
of office, which the 1992 Constitution prohibited.
All that image of a superman came crashing on 14 September 2000 when a
television station played a video tape show of shame: Vladimiro Illich
Montesinos was giving $15,000 (raw cash) to Alberto Kuri, an opposition
member of parliament; Montesinos, a very close aide to Fujimori is head of
the SIN, the secret services. He is reputed to have been a captain dismissed
from the Army for having sold secret information to the CIA. As head of the
secret services, he was collaborating with the CIA to fight the
narco-traffickers but he was reported to have exposed only those drug barons
who refused to grease his palm enough. After the television broadcast of the
bribery scandal, Montesinos was declared wanted as he ran away. Though, his
official salary was said to be only $20,000 per annum, three of his bank
accounts in Switzerland with $48 million have already been frozen.
These exclude those of his close relations: His wife, his daughter and his
sister. When Fujimori left Peru for Japan on 13 November 2000 with his
daughter, Keiko Sofia with a plane-load of some 30 suit cases, he knew he
would not come back early because the scandal had so much dented his image.
Fujimori's fall was a vindication for his ex-wife, Susanna (nee Higuchi) who
gave the television station, the nailing video tape. The lady had been
fighting the corrupt practices of the Fujimori clan since 1992. She had paid
dearly for it as many people did not believe her struggle until Fujimori
brazenly rigged the 28 May 2000 election to give himself a third mandate.
Both Susanna Higuchi and Alberto Fujimori are of Japanese families
established in Peru in the early 20th century and both strived in the tyre
retreading industry. Alberto wasofficially born in 1938 or thereabout
while Susanna was 14 years younger. But by the 1970, the Higuchi family had
become very prosperous while Alberto Fujimori was a mathematics lecturer.
When Susanna decided to marry Alberto, her father opposed it. When "poor"
insisted, her father disowned her, thus depriving her of any access or claim
to the family's wealth. Yet, she succeeded in building her own construction
company, a real conglomerate, the headquarters of which she called the
"Wiscosin Academy." When Alberto decided to vie for the presidency in 1990,
the mother of three, as usual put her fortune at his disposal. And they won.
According to Susanna, she contributed to the electoral success because she
believed so much in her husband's electioneering slogan: "honesty,
technology, labour." But immediately after, she noticed there was a small
kitchen cabinet made up mainly of brothers, sisters and other members of the
Fujimori family who were appointing ministers, ambassadors, controlling
state-owned banks and managing foreign loans and aids. The kitchen cabinet
was headed by Santiago Fujimori, Alberto's brother whom Susanna calls "el
ladron" (the bandit). She says the purpose of the clique was high level
corruption and that she had told her husband several times but the latter
failed to correct the situation. What pained her most, she said, was that
they, sometimes, used her name as First Lady to carry out those illicit
deals. Early in March 1992, a radio station had announced that Mrs. Fujimori
had gone to the Eastern Peruvian town of Talara to distribute clothes to the
needy. Since she did not know anything about it, she, on 17 March 1992, told
a group of journalists the truth about those things pinching her conscience:
"I would like to clear a point," she began, "One radio station, last
Tuesday, announced that "Mrs. Fujimori" had gone to Talara to distribute
clothes to people there. Actually, a certain "Mrs. Fujimori" went there but
I was not the one. It was Clorinda Emisui de Fujimori, the wife to my
brother-in-law who is in the habit of going there to distribute old rags.
You see, those ladies get from Japan donations in the form of clothes; they
select the best for themselves, sell the second best and distribute the
rest. And for this, they use my name, which needless to say it, is for me, a
source of deep indignation."
When one of the surprised journalists told her she was making a serious alle
gation against her sister-in-law, she responded by saying she was accusing
not only the said sister, but the whole of her family-in-law. From that date
to 1994, she was prevented from going outside the presidential palace and
also from receiving visitors. In a bid to free herself, when the 1995
presidential election was approaching, she filed her papers as a candidate.
But a law was, on 23 July 1994, voted to prevent anybody from the incumbent
president's family from contesting the Presidency. That was the "Susanna
Law," in the local parlance.
She told her husband that, that law was unconstitutional and that she would
go to court to seek redress. The then president responded by asking her,
"who is in your support?" And she responded: "nobody, except the
Constitution." After the Director of Public Prosecution (DPP) rejected her
application on 3 August 1994, she, two days later, successfully beat the
security cordon round her at the State House and ran away, which sent the
police, the army and all security forces on a manhunt for her. Before
getting formally divorced from Alberto Fujimori in 1996, Susanna, on 14
August 1995, accused the president and two of his ministers of corruption.
To that, the DPP said he would not act on it unless she gave proofs of her
allegation. In a bid to avoid such reactions, she made sure the instance of
corruption was recorded on video cassette and broadcast on television, so as
to convince the DPP. And the cassette sent the president, his DPP and other
men packing.
When asked whether she was not feeling lonely, Susanna once said "it is
better to live lonely than in bad company. I could not accept to live under
the same roof with corruption and injustice." For that lady who is now a
member of parliament, it was a victory well deserved. For, without her, the
country would still be under the Fujimori's corrupt regime. And Susanna is a
metaphor for the role educated women can play in the process of democracy
and development while Alberto Fujimori is same for the domineering,
self-assuming male gender ready to lord over and think for the woman.
In a paper titled: "Gender, Democracy and Development" which she presented
at a recent international forum, Joanna Foster denounced the concept of
democracy which placed women in the private sphere and made the female's
road to government and the economy pass necessarily through the offices of
men. This is even worse in Africa where cultural attitudes and norms see
women as good only for the homes. Worse still, is the fact that women's
participation in the military is very low at a time when military autocracy
became the norm in Africa had worsened the exclusion of women from politics
in the continent. So, decisions and actions in government are taken in the
name of women but without consulting them, with the assumption that the male
gender's interest, veiled under the name of national interest, is the same
as the interests of women.
As can be seen through Susanna's case, women have priorities which are often
very different from those of their husbands, their community and more so,
those of distant politicians. Policy decisions in the developing world, do
not take into account the needs of women which, funny enough, form more than
50 per cent of those who should constitute the target beneficiaries of such
policies. No wonder most policies, especially in Africa, don't work and
development is slow and difficult to sustain.
Though, African women were very active in the struggle against colonialism
in the 1950s and 1960s as well as in the struggle for democratisation in the
1990s, few of them were given positions of leadership in the succeeding
democratic regimes. This is worsened by the fact that even when a woman vies
for an election, other women tend not to vote for her; this is due to
ignorance, fear, envy, poverty people often vote for the highest bidder
and to the fatalistic disposition which makes them believe that since a
woman will never win an election, casting a vote for a woman is a waste of
vote. Quoting others before her, Foster says there is an urgent need for a
change. This, she says, must be through "an affirmative action in favour of
women" because, the laws and the customs such as that of patriarchy- and
the political institutions including party machinery are now heavily
tilted in favour of men. This, she posits, must be backed with "education
and information campaigns and training in political and leadership skills,
funding and campaign assistance for potential women candidates for offices."
Observers, however, express the view that often times, the problem is not
with the traditions or customs or the institutions but with the usage men
and women decide to make of them: For instance, when Susanna was to marry
Alberto Fujimori, her father opposed it on the ground that, it was immoral
whatever that means. Though, her father's stance could be described as
dictatorial, if she had listened, she would have been saved the agony of a
flopped marriage three decades later. But it is also arguable that both her
father's stance and the Fujimori dictatorship form part of the evil of men
against women and Susanna was right to have stood her ground to fight and
defeat them single-handedly.
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