SAVED FROM FORCED MARRIAGE
The Mariga orphans need education to improve their lot in life, argues Ike Willie-Nwobu
Rage, on a public scale, and revulsion may have ruined the marriage plans of a hundred orphaned girls in Niger State, but as always in Nigeria, it is what does not meet the eyes that is laced with blindness.
Nigeria is one of the worst places on earth to be a girl. Long ranked as one country where childhood often ends abruptly, girlhood has suffered much the same fate. The scales were always dangerously tipped against the girl-child but about a decade ago, precisely in April 2014, more than a hundred girls were snatched from the Government Girls Secondary School in Borno State. Dozens are yet to be returned or found. Lightning struck twice four years later when dozens of girls were brazenly abducted in Dapchi, Yobe State. Leah Sharibu who remains in captivity for refusing to convert to Islam remains the symbol of this last group of abductees.
Abductees. That is what Nigeria has made of its girls, whether at the hands of terrorists or paedophiles parading as husbands and emboldened by a pervasive patriarchy.
There have been further mass abductions and forced marriages. As girls have become dangerously at risk in Nigeria, policies and plans to improve their safety have run into the many obstacles erected by a predatory patriarchy. This month, a prominent face of this predatory patriarchy zoomed himself into the Nigerian experience in the form of Abdulmalik Sarkindaji, the Speaker of the Niger State House of Assembly.
As part of his constituency project, the speaker had planned to sponsor the wedding of about one hundred girls in Mariga Local Government Area where he comes from. The wedding was fixed for 24th May until outrage, public and piercing, forced him to abandon his plans.
Given the inherent impunity of Nigeria’s ruling class, the speaker may have conveniently ignored social media hounds but for the timely intervention of Uju Kennedy Ohanenye, a lawyer and the Minister of Women Affairs who petitioned the Inspector General of Police and made efforts to procure a court order to halt the mass marriage.
In choosing to sponsor the wedding as a constituency project, Sarkindaji prodded harsh sensibilities in a country where doing so often provokes backlash.
There is no love lost between Nigerians and their legislators. Suspicions over a lack of independence from the executive, and the misapplication of funds are as old as the country’s democracy.
Many Nigerians consider them co-conspirators with the executive and judiciary in an unspoken campaign to perpetually stymie Nigeria’s development. If the focus is usually on federal legislators in the National Assembly, it is because state legislators have long been written off as lost causes, pawns in the predatory board games of the executive.
Constituency allowances and projects have been a particularly sore point. Many Nigerians see nothing to honour the huge sums of money devoted in the annual budget for constituency project. These days, many legislators, petrified of insecurity in rural areas, seek refuge in their state capital or in Abuja, the Federal Capital Territory.
Maybe, Sarkindaji was genuinely out to make a difference having read the mood but what difference can early (and forced) marriage possibly make in the life of vulnerable orphans?
If marriage, technically forced in this instance, was all the Speaker could give girls rendered vulnerable by gender and the vagaries of life, then he should return to the classroom for intense lessons on gender justice and equality. Invariably, he lacks what it takes to lead the Niger State House of Assembly (NSHA).
If he thinks girls are only good for marriage, then nothing is left to the imagination about the direction the NSHA under him will take on issues that affect the girl-child.
The mentality that values women and girls by how marriageable they are is an age-long predation of patriarchy, one tied to the commoditization and exploitation of women.
What about education, especially in STEM courses where girls have been excellent under the right conditions?
At a time when the foundation of many marriages is creaking with the roof threatening to cave in, why does marriage still overshadow conversations about the welfare of women and girls?
Nigerians love a public spectacle, but often lack the stamina to see issues through. But this must be different. At stake is the welfare of more girls than the small sample in Mariga which would have been sold off but for the timely intervention of Nigerians. That is the power of vigilance. The embarrassed Speaker may have beaten a hasty retreat, but it is suspected that he cannot wait for the minister to return to Abuja where the Muslim Lawyers Association of Nigeria (MULAN) will be waiting with its team of five Senior Advocates of Nigeria and others to contend with the minister.
For MULAN, there is no trace of curiosity in how girls who have lost everything to banditry could. It would be clear to men of less education that the only choice offered the girls by the society is marriage. When education fails to serve an association of lawyers in a such a critical situation, the consequences are catastrophic. Pray, MULAN, what choice has the loss of parents to banditry left vulnerable girls than marriage? None, absolutely. It is shameful
A country that offers nothing but early marriage to its girls is a country stirring its death broth.
The speaker even had the cheeks to express his disappointment in the minister of women affairs for choosing to believe “social media reports”. His colleagues in the NHSA should be disappointed in him enough to impeach him for such folly. But history suggests they won’t.
As for the girls who have lost everything to banditry and the brutal bandwidth of predatory patriarchy, this is yet more blows. But survive they will for they are survivors whose ‘g’ resonates in girls as in grit, grace and greatness. They owe it to themselves and their dead parents to make small steps and find signs of life in a world that is as hostile as it is hypocritical.
