Of mass marriage, choices and ‘consent’

Abimbola Adelakun

Women affairs minister Uju Ohanenye’s decision to file a suit that put paid to the impending mass marriage of 100 orphaned girls in Niger State is well-intentioned, but she might soon discover that she played God for nothing. While addressing a press conference, the minister pointed out that she stopped the ceremony so the ministry could find out if the girls to be married out were of the appropriate ages, determine the (self-)interests of the organisers/ sponsors, and crucially, if those women gave their consent. Now, the last point is where her good intentions might meet some blowback. Yes, it is good to inquire if those marriages are consensual. But what is consent and what does it mean to give it amidst the circumstances of choicelessness, social/religious pressures, manipulation, and fear of the uncertain (especially for poor rural women with limited education and marketable skills)?

When women whose possibilities are narrowed by material poverty and limited upward mobility choose marriage as a face-saving option, a means to claim some social respectability, what does it mean to have made a “choice”? Sometimes, people consent to a legal contract like a marriage because they have no other choices. For all her good intentions, Ohanenye might soon find out that the road paved with the good intentions of gender empowerment might still lead to the Nigerian social and religious hell. Why? Given how much the controversy is wrapped in religious sentiment, it cannot be that hard for the girls’ family circles and the religious patriarchs in their community to “persuade” (read: coerce) the young women into giving “consent.”

Merely for the audacity of a southern Christian woman to challenge what they would like us to believe is an expression of the Islamic North culture, “consent” can be extracted from the girls to vindicate the decision of their religious leaders who have socialised them into believing that marriage is their destiny. So, if those women insist to the minister’s emissaries that they gave their “consent” as legal adults, would that still justify the decision to mass marry them off? What would the minister then do if those women insist the marriage is their choice? That is why I think she needs to be careful about uncritically elevating “consent” into the main issue at stake here. Many a “consents” inked into legal documents were never truly consensual; they were merely inconvenient choices made within the constrictions of choicelessness.

What I think needs to be severely discouraged is the culture of public officials using public funds to mass-marry people. Northern governors do it frequently, but it is a misuse of public resources. Other than a mad obsession with seeing women’s heads buried between the laps of domesticity, the men—and it’s always men!—have never advanced any logical reason for mass marriages and why the government should sponsor them. They say marriage is better than waywardness, but why are those the only options available to a woman?

Being married goes beyond the wedding ceremony. Marriage is a serious business that should be reserved only for those who can afford it—physically, emotionally, socially, and quite crucially, financially. Those who do not have the money to stage a ceremony can do themselves the favour of getting married quietly in front of a judge, go home, and start building their lives. Nobody needs to get married on charity, period.

 Marriage is also a private business, and nothing—and I repeat, nothing—says having a grand wedding makes you more married than those who have the dignity to wed according to the limit of their means. The issue of using public funds for marriage is another reason I see those criticising the minister for her intervention as clowns. You cannot purport to get married with other people’s money and then turn around to tell them they have no business in your private (religious) affair.

Speaker of Niger State House of Assembly, Abdulmalik Sarkindaji, the culprit who announced his plans to sponsor the ceremony as his “constituency project,” is also playing God by making the girls’ wedding his business. Yes, those girls lost their parents in banditry attacks in Mariga Local Government Area (which he represents), but why is it his business to pay the girls’ dowry?  He is a lawmaker, and a public representative should not assume a paternalistic role in other people’s private lives. It would be a different argument if he were a private individual using his money to sponsor weddings. Rich and generous people sponsor weddings; it is their prerogative.

Sarkindaji’s legislative overreach is the fallout of a political culture that hands lawmakers a huge sum of money to carry out something called “community projects,” initiatives well outside their responsibilities as lawmakers. For long, lawmakers have loosely defined what constitutes constituency projects, which is why people like Sarkindaji can stretch the meaning beyond tolerable elastic limits.

The mass wedding event, which would have taken place tomorrow but is now suspended, was to be conducted alongside the flagging-off of a road network and—this is where it gets interesting— distribution of cars to the eight district heads and other critical stakeholders in the local government area. That the wedding of 100 couples is not even the main point of the event—just one item to check off the agenda—makes you wonder why the spectacle was necessary in the first place. That old men will be gifted cars while young women will get husbands illustrates how the skewed allocation of resources makes for poor productivity in this country. If Sarkindaji wants to be a proper sugar daddy, he should consider giving the car gifts to the women instead. Who knows, that initiative might be their chance at an independent life which, I can bet, Sarkindaji’s daughters enjoy.

Though imperfect, Ohanenye’s challenging Sarkindaji is commendable. In fact, it is about time someone stood up to people who mass-marry poor women for dubious reasons and instructed them there is more to life than continuously satiating the region beneath your waistline. Mass marriage, as it takes place in northern Nigeria, is an agenda to keep poor people poor and perpetually beholden to predatory religious and political leaders. The problem of northern Nigeria has been a problem of the libido. To contain the libidinal urges, they stage mass (and early) marriages that produce mass children whose impoverished existence culminates in mass poverty, mass urchins that prowl the streets and eventually grow up into mass terrorists and mass bandits.

If Nigeria is the poverty capital of the world today, most of it has to do with the North. They reproduce an ever-growing army of children merely born to give them political victories and decommissioned soon after every election. Nobody has plans for those children’s future. And for a long time, nobody could challenge them because of their propensity for violence. Their leaders’ inability to think of serious means of resolving their social issues outside of frequently tucking people inside marriage to reproduce has created a mass problem for Nigeria, one that will unfold for at least another 50 years.

Finally, media reports stated that in response to the audacity of Ohanenye to file a suit against an impending mass marriage, the Muslim Lawyers Association declared that they had raised 32 lawyers—five of them Senior Advocates of Nigeria—to challenge her in court. As much as I doubt whether the minister is on firm legal ground on this issue, I think 32 supposedly trained professionals coming up to challenge her judgment is another pathetic example of the Nigerian tendency to overdo things. I would not worry about them too much though. If that many lawyers had to bunch themselves up like firewood just to pursue one case, they must be incompetent, ineffective, and frankly, unserious.