PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA

 

A Man with His 86 Wives

kudugana@yahoo.com

 

Bida, my hometown and the ancient capital of the once powerful and proud Nupe Kingdom which for decades stood between colonial Britain and its imperial designs on the Sokoto Caliphate, has been in the news lately for a reason which could scarcely be worse; the claim to divinity by a randy resident old man who has since become a cause celebre of sorts.

 

He is, of course, Muhammadu Bello Abubakar, the 84 year old man with 86 wives and, invariably, with countless sons and daughters, some young enough to be his great grandchildren.

 

Abubakar says he is a descendant of Masaba, the legendary warrior Etsu Nupe who ruled the kingdom between 1859 and 1873 and dealt with the British on equal footing. Abubakar’s claim of Masaba progeny has since been denounced by the clan, one of the three ruling houses of the Bida Emirate. I have it on good authority that actually the man originally came from Chikangi, a village in Kutigi District of the emirate. As a young man, he tended the horses of the then district head who was a descendant of Masaba. Eventually the district head took him under his wings and often travelled with him to and from Bida. This was how he came to regard himself as part of the Masaba household.

 

If Abubakar’s claim to descent from Masaba was dubious, it did not even come close to several of his other claims in the depth of their delusion. First he claimed in many of his media interviews that he has seen angels not just in dreams but in their physical forms and that they often came to him with messages from God.

 

In Islam, this is the height of blasphemy second only to associating anything else with God as object of worship. A cardinal article of faith in Islam is the belief that Prophet Muhammad (SAW) is the seal of prophethood. In other words he is the last to receive messages from God by any means including through angels.

 

Second, Abubakar claims the Quran, Islam’s holy book, does not forbid marrying more than four wives, hence his decision to marry 86 – and still counting. “Let anyone,” he said in one of his first interviews in the Weekly Trust of February 16, “come forward and show me a chapter in the Qur’an where marrying more than four wives is prohibited. I know there is no injunction asking anyone to stop at four. I believe that the more women you marry the more reward you get from Allah. Let them tell me if there is anywhere in the Qur’an where punishment is awarded to anyone who married more than four wives. I challenge whoever cares to bring me proof.”

 

Contrary to the man’s boast, the Qur’an's injunction to marry no more than four wives couldn’t be more explicit. In Nisa, Chapter 4, Verse 3, it says “... Marry such women as seem good to you, two or three or four; but if you fear that you will not do justice between them then (marry) only one or (slaves) that your right hands possess; that is more proper that you may not deviate from the right course.”

 

Obviously, if God wanted Muslims to have more than four wives, He would have said “marry two or three or four or more.” He did not. Instead He admonished a Muslim to stick to one if he feared he cannot do justice between them. And since justice is often a tough call in such matters of the heart it is only sensible to conclude that if God had any preference it would have been for one man one wife.

 

Still on the randy old man’s misrepresentation of the Qur’an. As a self-proclaimed Muslim Abubakar knows, or at least should know, that the Qur’an is not Islam’s only guide to ethics. There are others including Hadith, the Prophet Muhammad’s (SAW) words and deeds, and those of the first four Caliphs after him, Abubakar, Umar, Usman, and Ali. All forbade marrying more than four wives.

 

Abubakar says if the Qur’an wanted Muslims to stop at four wives, it would have proscribed a punishment for marrying more. Quite conveniently the old man chose to reduce the Qur’an to a mere penal code. Yet he knows that it is not every sin that the holy book proscribes specific punishments for. For example, it considers disrespect for one’s parents, especially one’s mother, a great sin. Yet no where does it proscribe any punishment for an insolent son or daughter beyond saying God’s curse is on such son or daughter.

 

The surprising thing to me in the light of all this - and more - has been how he was able to get away with his distortion of Islam all these long years. That his blasphemy finally caught up with him was no small thanks to the efforts of editors and reporters of Aminiya, a Hausa newspaper in the stable of Media Trust Ltd.

 

According to Aisha Kabiru Yusuf, Aminiya’s editor at the time the newspaper published its exclusive interview with him on February 15, she first heard about the man during one of the routine editorial conferences of Media Trust in January. A heated debate had ensued over the fight for first ladyship in states whose governors had more than one wife, when Ishaq Modibbo Kawu, ace columnist and staff of Daily Trust, said such cases were nothing compared to a story he'd heard about someone in Niger State with 100 wives. Those at the meeting were incredulous. To prove he didn’t just make it up he said he knew because his wife’s cousin was married to the man. She’s gone to seek spiritual help from the man, he said, but she ended up marrying him.

 

After a few weeks of digging, Aminiya finally traced the man to Bida. A day after it published its interview with him, the Weekly Trust carried the English translation. Then other newspapers in the country picked up his incredible story. However, it was not until the BBC Hausa Service interviewed him on August 10 almost six months after Aminiya that his story became headline news in the national media. This, by the way, says a lot about the neo-colonial mentality of our local media.

 

Apparently the follow-ups that the BBC interview triggered in our national media embarrassed the authorities in Niger State, Bida in particular, into action. Suddenly they found the voice to challenge a man whose deviant in-your-face behaviour had reached into the very heart of at least one of the three ruling houses of Bida Emirate. For, when the late Esu Nupe, Alhaji Umaru Sanda Ndayako, one of country’s wisest and most respected traditional rulers, was still alive, the man ensnared one of his younger sisters and one of his nieces into his harem, one after the other. Ndayako objected to the liaison to no avail.  An uncle of mine and a friend and confidant of the late Etsu told me Ndayako could not move against the man because of the level of underground support and even patronage he enjoyed among the clergy and the royalty in town.

 

Somewhat belatedly the current Etsu Nupe, Alhaji Yahaya Abubakar, decided to do what his predecessor and maternal uncle couldn't. Late last month he summoned the man to the palace and read him the riot act; he told him to shed 82 of his “wives” in 48 hours or leave town. This was after an assembly of Islamic scholars from Niger State and beyond had confronted the man and he had reluctantly admitted his deviant ways.

 

At first the man accepted to obey the Etsu’s order. Then, without warning, he changed his mind. On the appointed date he was to have brought the pictures and names of the four women he had chosen to retain as wives, he simply disappeared from town. Next thing he surfaced in a High Court in Abuja through his lawyers challenging the Etsu’s authority to banish him from his emirate or to tell him how many women he could marry.

 

This development was hardly surprising. It was predictable that our generally opportunistic and highly selective human rights organisations would attempt to go to the man’s rescue. Shortly after the Etsu threatened to ban him, Shehu Sani, speaking for one of the human rights organisations, the Civil Liberty Congress, condemned the Etsu and offered to defend the man’s rights in court.

 

However, when I spoke to Sani he said yes, they did take a decision to defend the man, but no, they were not the ones who did. Instead, it turned out that some lawyers in Minna, obviously with an eye on the publicity they will get along with possibly the fat fees, beat Sani’s organisation to it.

 

With the case in court, the matter has become even more complicated and more embarrassing to the authorities than it was. However, all this was not inevitable. All it would have taken the authorities to deal with the randy old man was to have arraigned him before a Sharia court the day after he first broke the four-wife limit prescribed by the religion he professed.

 

Long before Sharia became controversial in 1999, the penal code had always been there to deal with anyone who claimed he is a Muslim but violated its rules of personal relationship. For one reason or the other the authorities chose to turn a blind eye on Abubakar all these long years. Even after they belatedly woke up to their moral responsibility they gave him a choice and complicated matters even more by issuing a threat they had no power of enforcing.

 

Some people have argued that the man should be left alone since his women have not complained. On the contrary they all seem more than happy to be in his harem. This argument could not be more specious. Some people are more than happy to drink themselves silly with alcohol or smoke themselves into insanity with marijuana with apparently no harm to others. No one in his right mind would suggest that they should be left alone to pursue their “happiness.”

 

In his interview in Tell of September 15, the Etsu Nupe, Alhaji Yahaya, said the man is evil. “He is evil and everybody here knows that”, he said. That may well be true. In any case as the Etsu Nupe said in his interview, the man had long ago constituted himself into a threat to law and order in his community by the way he has tried to grab land from his neighbours and by his obstruction and diversion of the community’s drainages.

 

Even then, the Etsu, with due respect, is not the court. Only the Sharia courts can legally and constitutionally resolve this matter. It is still not too late to take him there.