USA Africa Dialogue Series - Ese Oruru: Why Nigerians must resist child marriage

Ese Oruru: Why Nigerians must resist child marriage

KAYODE KETEFE

The rather embarrassing saga of how 14-year-old girl, Miss Ese Oruru, who in August 2015, was abducted in Opolo, Yenagoa Local Government Area of Bayelsa State, by one Yunusa Yellow, has reopened the debate why Nigeria must fight the practice of child marriage.
It was widely-reported in the media that last August Ese, who was 13 then, was abducted and taken to Kano, by Yunusa, who converted her to Islam and married her.
Repeated visits by Ese's parents, according to the media, had failed to procure liberty.
This stalemate has however been resolved with the intervention of Emir of Kano, Mallam Lamido Sanusi and as at the time of writing this, the infant is said to be in the police protective custody while her alleged kidnapper is said to have been arrested and detained at the Zone 1 Police Headquarters, Kano.
The last chapter in this harrowing saga is for the poor girl to be medically and psychologically-rehabilitated prior to permanent reunion with her family.
There is however a twist to the story, there is a report just filtering in that the girl herself said "confessing" that she freely chose to convert to her abductor's religion and that she would rather remain with him.
If this is true, it does not change anything, in fact it is irrelevant. This being because the age of attainment of majority and its attendant discretion in Nigeria is 18, therefore the girl is legally incapable of taking such a weighty decision.
Upon attaining 18 years, she can decide to marry any man of her choice, be he a Cameroonian, or a Zulu from South Africa! But now, she is just a minor; she is amenable to full protection by her parents and the state even against herself.
The fallout from this development is the imperative to re-examine the problem of child marriage in Nigeria. Without doubt, Child marriage is illegal and constitutes an offence under the Child Rights Act. The problem here however is that the Child Right Act is inferior Constitution and the Constitution seem to recognize child marriage!
This unwitting recognition is contained under Section 29 of the constitution which makes provisions on renunciation of Nigeria's citizenship, the said section in its subsection 4 (b) provides that "any woman who is married shall be deemed to be of full age".
The implication of this is that the Constitution indirectly recognises child marriage as it bestows legal capacity of an adult on any girl that is married even if she just nine years of age!
The agitations of many human rights groups for the removal of this obnoxious clause have hitherto been ignored.
There came a ray of hope in 2013 when the Senate Committee on Constitutional Review recommended the removal of the offensive section. As a matter of fact, the Plenary Senate session had approved the expurgation of the section with 75 votes.
But all of a sudden the Senate revisited the issue and conducted fresh voting where it was unable to obtain two-thirds votes to amend the section! This was due to Senator Ahmad Sani Yerima's objection who insisted that the removal of the section would be against the tenets of Islam.
Contrary to the submission of Yerima, many informed scholars on Islamic jurisprudence have insisted that Islam never sanctions marrying off under-age girls.
For example, a human rights activist and the wife of the former Chief Justice of Nigeria, Mrs. Maryam Uwais, had said there is nothing in Islam that supports the under- age marriage.
She said: "Contrary to the position conveyed by the Senator from Zamfara, there is certainly no unanimity of positions on such contemporary matters of social interaction, within Islamic jurists or the various schools of thought."
Even in the Southern part, the culture of child marriage is not unpopular. The culture of marrying off underage girls is well-entrenched, and dated back to the olden days when many societies engaged in numerous adventures that were perilous to the male population like seafaring and warfare, spawning disproportion in male-female statistics in such societies.
Thus, a demographic problem of superfluous female population ensued, necessitating expedient responses like polygamy to take care of the extra women. The culture of child marriage became an offshoot of polygamy after the latter had become entrenched in order to ensure constant supply of marriageable material to support polygamy!
Today, we know that there is a lot of physical, health, psychological and even economic reasons why young girls should not be married off at tender age.
Frankly, a girl undergoing pubertal changes is ill-adapted to strenuous conditions of gestation and this often causes physical and emotional damage to the young woman. The arising complications may also cause infant mortality, morbidity, the dreaded Vesicovaginal fistula or even death.
Besides, rushing young girls into marital responsibilities at a time they should learn a trade, get formal education or be indentured to a vocation would result in economic deprivations of these youngsters later in life.
Nigeria must revisit the issue of expunging the offensive Clause 29 (4) (b) from our grundnorm. As a matter of fact the section should be among those to be jettisoned in any next attempt to amend our constitution. It has been shown that child marriage is never a tenet of Islam while its origin in the cultural practices among the peoples of Southern Nigeria has been exposed to mere fortuitous.

Ketefe may be followed on twitter @Ketesco

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