Will This Northern Mass (Child) Marriage Ever End?
By Victor Oluwayemi, PhD
Nigeria is an “interesting” place and more “interesting” is its Northern part, which tends to project monolithic ideology – a façade in itself. The North is as diverse as the South, if not more. While it will be too blanket to claim that the North is Muslim as it is usually done by the adherents of the Islamic faith of Northern origin, that Islam predominates in the North is evident, most especially in the North West and North East geopolitical zones.
Although Nigeria is infamously acclaimed the poverty capital of the world, the North seems to occupy the centre stage of the country’s multidimensional poverty, caused by a potpourri of many things. Aside poverty, child marriage and mass wedding have also become dominant signatures of the North, and the trio are closely intertwined, no doubt.
Ordinarily, nothing is wrong with mass wedding itself, specifically if the would-be spouses are really the actual players within the marital game. There is no law or custom that debars a group of willing heterosexual people mass-marrying one another today in Nigeria. However, most times the real players and/or sponsors of these mass weddings are political office holders in collusion with religious leaders, who are always bereft of how governance should be in the 21st century in a Third World country like Nigeria, using state resources as they like.
These ones take it upon themselves to shepherd innocent and vulnerable girls to different marital beds to be “slaughtered” by ready-to-pounce predatory men, whose sole purpose in life is to operationalise their libidinal strength and paedophiliac tendencies on fresh, vulnerable and young girls.
The latest in this culture of mass wedding and child marriage as reported in the news is the proposed mass wedding of over 100 girls in Niger State, sponsored by the Speaker of the State Assembly, Abdulmalik Sarkin-Daji, in cahoots with their religious leaders, today Friday, 24 May, 2024. If not for the suit initiated by the minister of women affairs, Uju Kennedy-Ohanenye, to stop the ceremony, it would be held as proposed this day. I am sure the North is even offended that an ordinary southern woman, Ohanenye, is challenging its cherished and revered culture. Who does she think she is?
No wonder the North, as reported in the media, has raised five Senior Advocates of Nigeria and 27 other lawyers through the Muslim Lawyers Association to challenge the suit in court. What a travesty!
It Is rather unfortunate that Sarkin-Daji and his co-travellers could not think of any viable and worthwhile ventures, skills or education to bequeath to these vulnerable orphaned girls but marriage. Despite Human Development Index (HDI) being the lowest in the North, millions of out-of-school children litter the streets, with low literacy rate while girl-child education enjoys the bottom of the valley.
The mass wedding ceremony is one of Sarkin-Daji’s constituency projects to be “commissioned” on the said day. While some district heads and traditional leaders, mainly men, would be given cars, the “best” gift the orphaned girls would get is penile intervention. What a sickening society! Who cursed these people that they should not reason beyond the fleeting pleasure of their third legs, coitus and warmth of female genitalia?
Doubly tragic is the case of these orphaned girls whose parents were killed by bandits (another Nigeria’s euphemism for terrorists, mostly of Northwestern origin), who frequently go on looting, kidnapping and killing spree in the North, to be mass-married off as if they amount to nothing. The government cannot protect them or their parents from insecurity and terrorism, and the same government will ship them off to their husbands’ houses, usually without their consent.
But who bloody cares of a woman’s consent, not to talk of that of young and vulnerable girls in this country?
And predictably, they would go on procreating more bandits/terrorists, and Almajiri children who will litter the whole North, further complicating the dire poverty state of the country, and serve as political tools for politicians to win elections and unleash violence and mayhem on their political and religious enemies in years to come, thus perpetuating the vicious cycle of corruption, impoverishment and multidimensional poverty in Nigeria.
Unless the young, educated and sane populace of the North shake off, fight for their destiny and break off the shackles of perpetual penury and misgovernment, their girl-children will continue to be mass-married off by their self-centred, selfish and self-perpetuating rulers. Over all, the North will continue to put or throw a spanner in the (Nigeria’s) works, overburdening the country with these Stone Age practices.
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