Benin business tycoon Ybatou Glele at the intersection of politics and business

Soumanou Salifou

We were at first overwhelmed by the breathtaking multi-million dollar house Mr. and Mrs. Glèlè and their three children call home. The beautiful marble floor, the expensive furniture and elegant decorations greeted us warmly before our host and lady of the house, first-term legislator and business tycoon Yibatou Sani Glèlè, came to sit with us for an hour-long interview about the plight of Benin women, her contribution to women’s cause in the country, and her political ambitions.

Yibatou Sani Glèlè is arguably among the ten wealthiest people in Benin, West Africa. She is the president of her own multi-million dollar textile company, Melvina, for which she is best known. But she has stakes in several other industries, including real-estate. She reportedly holds a whoppy ten percent share in one of the local banks – a prosperous business in the country.

Melvina, as she is also called, was born on August 20, 1949 into a family of traders. She makes no mystery of her little formal education, which culminated in a junior degree in accounting. “I’ve always seen my mother handle a lot of money, so I wanted to become a trader like her. Luckily, my parents insisted that I go to school,” she tells The African. (Her three daughters have all pursued higher education in North America, with two holding an MBA from an American university).

Yibatou Sani Glèlè was sworn in as legislator on May 7, 2007. She is a member of the Parti du Renouveau Démocratique(PRD) founded by former speaker of parliament and one-time prime minister Adrien Houngbédji who lost the 2006 presidential election. Glèlè is currently the vice-chaiperson of the PRD, second only to Houngbédji whose bid for the presidency she generously funded.

Glèlè may not have been an active politician until this year, but she says she has been on the sidelines of politics since 1991: “I was the supporter of a political leader in whom I believe. I’ve always supported him financially to help spread his message around. I made a decision a long time ago not to engage in politics until I am fifty. The time has come, and here I am.”

Melvina is one of the nine female lawmakers in the Benin parliament which has 83 members. The female population in the country is slightly larger than the male population, but the percentage of women in the legislative body is under 11%. Glèlè does not like that.

Our freshman legislator tells The African she’s working with her female peers beyond party line in order for more females to hold elected offices: “I think the next legislature will be totally different, because we, the women, have asked the political parties to sponsor many female candidates,” she says, adding: “Already, you will see more women win seats in the municipal elections scheduled for December of this year.”

Besides women’s own lack of interest in politics and the lingering — though now largely disguised — discrimination against women, men in Africa dominate the political world — and, indeed, many other worlds — because, historically, African parents have favoured the schooling of their boy-children over that of their girl-children. This has resulted in men being intellectually better equipped than women to meet many a requirement and challenge of modern times.

However, thanks to aggressive campaigns in many African countries, parents now indiscriminately send their boy-children and girl-children to school. In fact, in some schools, girls outnumber boys.

In Benin, quite a few women have risen to prominent positions in politics, in government as well as in business.

Since the establishment of the Constitutional Court in the early nineties, its president has always been a woman. The High Court of Justice, which is mandated to judge the country’s political leadership, is also headed by a woman. Benin also boast a number of female lawyers. The number of female ministers in President Boni Yayi’s cabinet went up recently to six, out of 26.

Benin women — usually with little or no formal education — are the backbone of the so-called informal sector (unregistered, non-taxpaying small businesses) which account for a significant part of the country’s GDP. Marketplaces and street corners everywhere are filled with these women who trade in a host of products including food products, textile and cosmetics. For several years, Glèlè has done quite a lot to empower this category of women.

In Tori, a small town in Southern Benin, Glèlè continuously funds a training program for women who learn how to use local ingredients to make foods for commercial purposes. The women, in turn, train others. In Panhouian, in the center region, Glèlè gives the local women the initial capital to sustain a business consisting in the making of the most common foodstaple in the country, gari. She plans to start a similar program in Porto-Novo, her constituency.

Already, her constituency is grateful to her for fully financing back in 1990 a one-million dollar extension of the Poto-Novo general hospital. The extension has seventy beds and state-of-the-art materials imported from Italy. In Cotonou, the main city in Benin, every Wednesday she has food delivered to the psychiatric center that treats mentally ill patients.

Visibly, Glèlè was reluctant to discuss her charity work with us. “I feel the little things we do are too little to be discussed,” she pleaded, with a shy smile.

Despite her wealth and high profile, Glèlè is a down-to-earth person apparently insensitive to cheap flattery, unlike many of her peers.

In an effort to verify everything we have heard and read about her, we showed her a magazine article about her and inquired about its accuracy. After a glance at the material —which she quickly recognized — she said most of it was factual, adding: “I don’t know about the rest.”

The ‘rest’ was paragraphs after paragraphs in which the reporter delights in depicting her “sweet voice that contrasts with the weight of her words,” her “dislike for adults who act like children on a playground,” her “sharp mind,” her “penetrating look, whether one is in her presence or looking at her picture,” and the fact that “she is always surrounded by courtiers and friends subjugated by her aura.”

Standing tall at the intersection of business and politics, Glèlè demonstrates a resolve to help improve the plight of women in a society where men hold the lion’s share of power and everything that comes with it.

Do women in Benin now get more respect from men than they used to? we asked our host. She believes they do, adding that “They have earned that respect thanks to their achievements.” Our legislator says that “Most African men think of a woman as a weak creature unfit to rule a man.” She feels that men everywhere, not just in Africa, have a superiority complex toward women, and “don’t give women the chance to play the role they can play very well.” However, our legislator does not agree with so-called ‘iron-fist women’ who tend to push their husbands around. She believes in mutual respect between men and women.

In the end we asked her: Do you foresee a woman becoming the president of Benin in the near future? “That’s probably me, because I have that ambition,” she replied, with her usual smile.