A disease ails Nigeria’s North, and it’s called culture. You have probably read the story of the 14-year-old bride who allegedly poisoned her 34-year-old groom on their wedding night in Jigawa State last December. The story of the suspect, Zahara’u Dauda, and the victim, Khamis Haruna, who survived the killer meal of jollof spaghetti and whose friend Muhammad Alfah did not live to tell his horror story, underlines the malaise that governs this society. Hear Haruna telling the Nigerian Tribune his love story: “We were married out of love. She loves me and I love her too. We were in love for two years. I saw her in the neighboring village called Bakata in Kiyawa Local Government Area and approached her almost two years ago. Since she was still young, I waited. And when she clocked 14 years, I made all the arrangements for marriage and we got married on a Friday and I brought her to my house. We were married for love. She never showed any worry in our relationship.”
First off, RIP to the dead and quick recovery to the survivor(s). But I can’t help feeling that Haruna’s story sounds ridiculously moronic. Somehow, we are supposed to be comfortable with the fact that a 34-year-old roused himself, eager to violate a mere child in the name of culture. Mr Haruna and the suspect “were in love for two years,” meaning that she was only 12 when he captured her heart. God have mercy! Mr Haruna “made all the arrangements” for marriage to a child, callously indifferent to the ailments the union was going to spring. Isn’t it strange that the crooks who gave us “culture” are long dead, but we perpetuate their vicious crimes? It was culture that made Nefertiti Pharaoh Akhenaten’s bride at 12 in ancient Egypt. And Isabella of Valois, England’s Richard II’s bride at the age of six.
If I was at table and anyone mentioned a forthcoming wedding to a 14-year-old girl, I am sure I would have indigestion. I am apparently no spokesman for Mr Haruna’s culture of cradle robbery that thrusts mere children into the world of legitimized sexual assault and serial violations. Completely ill-prepared for the strange, misbegotten world of matrimony into which they are thrust, child brides often activate their suppressed dissent in violent ways. In 2014, 14-year-old Wasila Umaru killed her 35-year-old groom, Umaru Sani, and a friend in Kano. The unwilling bride had bought rat poison at a village market and prepared poisoned rice. She did the crime “because she was forced to marry a man she did not love.”
In June 2018, teenager Noura Hussein had her death sentence commuted to a five-year prison term by an appeal court in Sudan following international outcry. The child bride had killed her husband after enduring serial rape ordeals. Sudanese law senselessly allows children above 10 to be married with a judge’s permission, and leprous marriages are routine. In 2023, Samira Sabzian, a child bride convicted for murdering her abusive husband, was executed with relish in Iran. Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam, director of the Norway-based Iran Human Rights (IHR), was livid with rage: “Samira was a victim of years of gender apartheid, child marriage, and domestic violence, and today she fell victim to the incompetent and corrupt regime’s killing machine.”
In That cradle robbery in Bayelsa (January 6, 2024), I wrote: “Today, Northern Nigeria, teeming with child brides, best epitomizes this malady, although Niger Republic, where 76% of girls are married off before 18 and 28% before 15, is statistically the country with the highest rate of child brides in the world. And the political beneficiaries of this biological robbery aren’t letting up, principally because the state has been a big letdown. Child marriage should rank among war crimes given the extent of its evil, but worldwide, one in five girls ends up in its trap. Africa is home to more than 130 million child brides and as of January 2023, Nigeria had an estimated 22 million child brides, the population of Benin Republic and Togo combined, never mind that a 2017 World Bank/ICRW study estimated that ending child marriage could generate Nigeria some $7.6 billion in earnings and productivity. If those brides escaped to any of Niger, the Central African Republic, Chad, Burkina Faso, Mali, or Guinea, they would walk into the leprous embrace of lechers. Nationally, 30.3% of girls in Nigeria are thrust upon marriage before they turn 18 and 12.3% before 15. Only a miserly 1.6% of boys suffer this indignity.” I have found no reason to disturb this conclusion.
What I might add, though, is that the situation in the so-called advanced climes is just as gross. Per the Colorado Public Radio columnist Andrea Dukakis: “The U.S. Census Bureau did not link age with marital status till 1880, which makes national figures unavailable before that time. But in that year, 11.7 percent of fifteen-to-nineteen-year-old girls were wives. That number dipped in 1890 and then increased incrementally through the 1920s to 12.6 percent in 1930.” Child marriage was actually legal in all 50 states until 2018. Per a 2021 study, nearly 300,000 minors, most of them girls, were victims of that culture between 2000 and 2018.
“Child bride’s killing shocks Nigerians” is the title of a Washington Post May 3, 1987 story. The rider: “Death of girl, married at 9, draws outcry over old custom.” Certain hypocrites who cried foul then are still laying siege to the bodies of minors. Says the UN Sustainable Development Group: “Trapped at homes, prevented from going to schools, isolated from their families, friends and communities—this is the life of most child brides. Replacing learning at schools, playing with their friends and living their childhood with home responsibilities, household chores, and raising children while they themselves are children pose a risk to their lives, the lives of their children and the future of their communities.” How profoundly sad!
Look at this story of regret by Idrisu Ali, a Bauchi-based buffoon who married off his 12-year-old daughter, Fatima, to a 65-year-old accomplice. Ali told Forbes in 2018: “I was sad because he was too old. I wanted her to marry someone younger, say 55 or 50, because he could take care of her for a longer time before he dies. But he was a successful farmer in the village and he paid a good dowry.” To this pestilential, culturally castrated fellow, the ideal husband for a 12-year-old should be someone between 50 and 55. To think that a man would subject his child to legitimized rape just for some crops! The bride wasn’t even supposed to have any say in her own future!
To escape poverty, parents throw their children into a more egregious poverty trap. Betrayed by their parents and society, child brides confront childbirth complications, malnutrition and anemia, and sexually transmitted infections (STIs). They are socially isolated, economically dependent, and emotionally distressed. And when they react in the most unfortunate ways that their limited horizon dictates, the law that lay idly by when lechers robbed them of their childhood pounces, ready to send them to hell. Over to the Jigawa State authorities, who have vowed that justice “will take its course” while making mincemeat of the future of their own children through child marriage!
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