Do I Believe in Women Empowerment?

There was a season in my life when I landed a job role, I was genuinely excited about. The excitement came because, after passing my CISA exam in February 2021, I was still waiting to fulfill the additional requirements to become officially certified. There was a timeframe attached to those requirements, and I often wondered when it would happen.

Not long after passing my exam, God opened a door for me, and I got a job. That in itself was a testimony I will share later. Within two months, however, I was moved to another department on that job. In that new placement, I was providing HR and administrative support, but I was stationed at the reception. Essentially, I was functioning as a receptionist.

At first, I did not mind, especially because the previous department had not been fulfilling. In fact, I felt grateful for the move. But over time, it dawned on me that though I was assisting HR staff, my core responsibility was to sit at the front desk, receive people, and respond to inquiries. It weighed heavily on me. I would ask God, "You are the one ordering my steps. You led me here after my exam. Why am I at the reception?"

The work itself was not the problem. I do not despise any job, and I certainly do not look down on receptionists. But one day someone made a comment that pierced me. They said, "You and the cleaners are on the same level, that’s why they laugh and frolic with you at the front desk." That was painful. It made me question, "God, do you raise a man only to break him again? I do not believe so."

In His mercy, God opened another door, and I moved into a role that was finally aligned with my CISA studies. I joined the Operational Risk Department, where much of the work involved business resilience, one of the core domains of the CISA exam. I was relieved and excited.

Yet even there, challenges arose. My head of department ordered that I should not be given access to the Standard Operating Procedures or any department files because, according to her, I was not staff. Confused, I went to HR and asked, "Am I staff of this company or not?" They assured me that I was staff, I had signed a contract, and I was even under review for confirmation. So I wondered, why then was I being denied access to the very documents necessary for my training?

The irony was striking. Operational Risk as a function constantly emphasizes the dangers of staff not knowing their duties and responsibilities and insists that everyone must read and comply with SOPs. Yet here I was, in that very department, forbidden from doing exactly that.

We were only three people in the department: the head, my direct line manager, and me under training. It was at this point that my direct line manager, one of the greatest blessings in my journey, made a decision. He chose to train me secretly. Instead of opening SOPs in plain view, he would share knowledge and guide me quietly, without making it obvious. For eight months, he invested in me this way.

Some days my direct line manager would tell me to come to the office early. He would use that time, before my head of department arrived, to secretly train me and walk me through the SOPs. He even insisted I get a notebook to jot things down so I could go home and study. I still remember the day she noticed him giving me a walkthrough. She became furious, declaring again that I was not supposed to touch, read, or look at any departmental documents. She even said she alone would determine the work I was to do.

Confused, I went back to HR. But by that time, it had already become obvious to others in the company that she was mistreating me. In fact, I later learned that other people, unprovoked, had started going to HR to complain about the way she treated me, urging them to either step in or move me to another department.

Still, she would assign me tasks on her terms. One of the biggest responsibilities she gave me was to facilitate a workshop for some critical units and senior managers across the organization. It had been agreed in a management meeting that her department would be responsible for the facilitation, so the responsibility was handed to me. I threw myself into it wholeheartedly. I researched venues, requested invoices, prepared memos, followed every procedure, and put all the paperwork together.

When everything was ready, she suddenly told me she did not like the date chosen. I was shocked, because that date had been agreed by all the department heads, including her, in a formal meeting. It had already been communicated to all stakeholders and approvals were secured. I asked why she wanted to change it, and her reason floored me: the workshop date fell on her birthday, and she could not spend her birthday at an official workshop.

She told me to change the date, even though she knew I had no authority to do that. Then, almost immediately, she traveled to Nigeria for a week, leaving me stuck. I could not face the managers to explain, so I stayed silent, avoiding them as much as possible.

But one of the senior managers noticed. He summoned me and asked why I was stalling the workshop. He said finance had reported that I had not submitted the final paperwork needed for the release of funds, even though all approvals were complete. At that point, I could not hold back my tears. I explained everything to him exactly as it had happened.

Now, these managers knew my head of department. They knew her ways. They knew I was not lying. So this senior manager wrote her an email, on behalf of the others, questioning why she was stalling the workshop and why she had left me stranded. He did not copy me in that email because he wanted to handle it at their level.

But when she responded, she copied me and used the opportunity to attack me in the email, calling me a liar and accusing me of communicating things I did not understand. The senior manager immediately checked her and told her to leave me out of it, making it clear that the matter was about her, not me.

Still, things worsened. Around that same time, she instructed me to work on a corporate blast for our department on business continuity planning. I prepared the content and submitted it to marketing, as required. Marketing told me it would have to be queued with other projects before publication.

I remember very well how the dynamics changed around that time. While she was on her trip to Nigeria, she reached out to me on WhatsApp about the corporate blast she had assigned me. Now, all official communication in the company was through email for record keeping, trails, and accountability. So when she sent me a personal WhatsApp message demanding updates as though it was a work platform, I was surprised. Nevertheless, I responded respectfully and informed her that I had already sent her the update via email. I even suggested she check her inbox in case she had missed it.

Her response shocked me. She became angry over WhatsApp and sent messages telling me that my “wings would be clipped.” That cut deep. I remember thinking, “God, you led me here, you ordered my steps into this department, how is this happening? How do you bring me to a place that aligns with my professional path, only for it to feel like I am being crushed?”

By this time, more and more people in the organization had begun going to HR on their own to report how she was treating me. It was no longer just my word against hers; others could see what was going on.

When she returned from Nigeria, we finally went ahead with the workshop I had planned and facilitated. The MD himself was impressed. He commended the hotel selection, the comfort of the staff, and the smooth facilitation. He even remarked that he had not known such a serene hotel existed. Then he asked who had organized it, ready to praise the person behind the work. Before anyone could speak, she jumped up and shouted across the hall that “we only settled on this hotel because we didn’t have anywhere else to go.” The room went quiet. People were visibly sad and embarrassed on my behalf. Later, several approached me to encourage me to ignore her because her actions were becoming obvious.

After the workshop, she intensified her efforts to frustrate me. Whenever she sensed that my line manager was about to train or assign me meaningful work, she would deliberately send me on errands far beneath my role. She would make me buy her food, accompany her to try on shoes, or escort her on airport runs that had nothing to do with our department. She would pull me aside to vent, gossip about colleagues, or berate my appearance. It felt like I was reduced to something lower than a personal assistant.

Yet my line manager refused to give up on me. Because the nature of operational risk involved engaging other departments, he would often work from different units. He began telling me to bring my laptop and join him whenever he went to work elsewhere. This became his strategy to continue training me in operational risk management despite her constant interference.

But her taunting never ceased. It wore me down day by day until I reached my breaking point. One day after another round of condescension, I spoke up. I told her plainly, “Anytime I wake up in the morning and remember that I have to come to the office and work with you, I lose the will to come. I feel demotivated. I do not believe my life can progress under your leadership because your leadership has consistently reduced me to the most inadequate form of myself.”

Ironically, she herself would sometimes tell me how much determination and spirit she saw in me, how she believed I would become a great risk manager someday. But I have learned that when someone acknowledges your potential, it does not always mean they are happy about it. People can recognize your greatness and still work tirelessly to suppress it with every power they have.

There were days in the office when people would see me crying. Sometimes I would step out and cry quietly in a corner, and when I came back, my swollen eyes gave me away. I remember Opebia car park. I would leave the building, walk there because it was quiet, and cry. People in my office began noticing, and eventually some of them reported what they saw to HR.

One day HR called me into her office. She told me that several complaints had come to her concerning my well-being. She said I should take note that she was working on it, and that soon there would be a change, so I should not worry. I was shocked. Later, someone from HR confided in me that a number of people had gone to their office, not to complain about themselves, but to defend me. They had gone to speak up for me.

The situation was so public and terrible that even the Chief Risk Officer had to intervene. Eventually, HR got approval to move me from her department to IT Audit, which was a better fit for my professional certification. The day they sent the official email to move me, this woman went into a frenzy. She fought managers, made endless phone calls about my life, but never addressed me directly. I would overhear her saying she would never let me leave her department because she had plans for me.

People wondered why. After all, she hardly gave me any real work. If not for my direct line manager, who actively tried to involve me in tasks against her orders, I would have acquired no skills at all in that department. Colleagues told me openly that they noticed she only sent me on errands: buying lunch, picking up deliveries, changing her dollars. They said they had even heard her declare that I was not staff, and that she would not allow my line manager to train me.

When her resistance failed, she wrote to HR and management, insisting I could only leave her department if they found someone with the exact same qualifications to replace me. Recruitment takes time, so I remained under her control. During this period, she made it a point to frustrate me every single moment. I often escaped to the toilet to cry, or to Opebia car park to cry. The more she mistreated me, the more people went to HR to ask why I had not yet been moved as promised. The situation was spiraling out of control.

By the grace of God, another door opened, and I got another job. If that opportunity had not come, this woman would never have released me. The tension grew so bad that she even accused me of spreading bad news about her in the company, claiming that in all her 20 years of banking, no one had ever threatened her career the way I had. Imagine mistreating someone’s child so badly, then calling yourself the victim.

But what struck me most was that even after I left, things did not immediately get better. At the next company, I cried for a year and a half. Every single month within that period, I cried. Sometimes I would just sit, thinking, asking God questions: why? Why me?

Yet, even in the midst of those questions, my consolation has been this: even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me. I have realized that when God calls you, and we scale it down to what it really means to be chosen, no chosen one in the Bible ever had it easy. But in the end, God always justified Himself.

So, in all my difficulties and challenges, I hold on to this truth: at the end of the day, God will justify Himself in my life. Amen.

I have also included the link to the story of what happened to me after leaving this organization. You can read it below.

https://www.abenas.blog/post/dear-god-this-dream-became-a-nightmare