PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA

Yarima’s Abuse of Religion

Roughly 10 years after he pioneered the contentious Sharia criminal law as governor of Zamfara State, Senator Ahmed Sani, Yariman Bakura, is back in the headline news. This time he has provoked controversy by his recent marriage to an allegedly under aged Egyptian girl in Abuja. And as was the case last time the controversy has, so far at least, generated more heat than light.

On the one hand, the vast majority of newspaper pundits, human rights organizations and not a few of his legislative colleagues, many, if not all, of them sworn enemies of his “political Sharia,” have charged him with cradle snatching and called him all manner of names. Yarima, many of them have said, should be sacked from the Senate at the least. Better still, some have said, he should be prosecuted for violating Section 21 of the Child Rights Act of 2003 which provides for up to five years jail for anyone found guilty of violating the law.

On the other hand, many an imam who made the issue the subject of their khutbah in mosques last Friday in Kaduna and elsewhere during the Juma’a prayers, have rallied behind the senator. They all seemed to agree with his counter-charge that his critics have merely been hiding behind his so-called cradle snatching to ridicule Islam. After all, he said, he has not violated any of Allah’s injunctions on wedlock nor has he violated any of the traditions of Prophet Muhammad (Peace be upon him) on the same subject.

In his interview in the Daily Trust of April 29, for example, the senator said in effect he did not care to be judged by Nigeria’s Constitution and laws that he once swore as governor, and now as senator, to uphold. “Whatever the Qur’an and the hadith of the Holy Prophet authorizes,” he said, “I try my best to live up to it. Whatever they forbid I try my best not to do it. These are the guiding rules of my life. So if anyone decides to judge me according to rules other than those prescribed by Allah and the Holy Prophet, then he is wasting his time, because they are not my guiding principles.”

The senator said pretty much the same thing in his widely quoted interview with the BBC Hausa service mid last week.

Technically the senator and his supporters are right that he has not violated any Islamic injunctions in marrying a girl-child. He has denied that she is 13, as has been widely claimed, but he would not say how old. Press enquiries about her age at the Egyptian Embassy in Abuja have drawn a blank. Even then it is almost certain that she is below the so-called age of consent – 18.

The Qur’an has a long list of what women a man can marry and what women he can’t. The list does not include girls under 18. Indeed Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) married Ai’sha at the age of seven, some say six, and consummated the marriage at nine.

If this sounds scandalous in this day and age it is because we have come to believe that women mature only at 18. Nothing can be more fallacious. The almost universal choice of 18 as the age of consent has little or no scientific basis. Eighteen may be the age the bone structure of a girl is assumed to be fully developed to withstand the rigours of childbirth but in Islam, as in most other beliefs and cultures, a girl is considered mature both physically and psychologically when she starts to menstruate. Most do so well below 18. And many can, and do, bear children safely at well below that age.

Eighteen as the age of consent is essentially a Western concept. Yet as last week’s London Economist (April 24) pointed out in an article on British education, four in every 100 British girls under 18 get pregnant every year. For all we know the figure for Nigeria is worse. Yet it is a safe bet that Yarima’s critics who take their cues on ethics mostly from the West see nothing wrong with such a phenomenon. If they do the fact is that they have never raised as much hell about under age sex, even that outside wedlock, as they have since Yarima’s wedding to his Egyptian girl-child.

Therefore Yarima and his supporters do have a point when they accuse at least some of his critics of hypocrisy.

This, however, is as far as I would go in defence of the senator. Technically he may not have breached any Islamic injunction in marrying a girl-child, but the issue here is not merely technical. It is also moral in at least two aspects.

First, the context of the marriage. It seems certain that he divorced one of his four wives so as to marry the Egyptian and still keep within the limit of four allowed by Islam. The poor local child was reportedly in form two in a secondary school when he married her and kept her out of school. She had a child for him at the time he divorced her. Islam, unlike, say, Catholicism, condones divorce as a last resort but unequivocally forbids it just to marry another woman or just for the hell of it, which amounts more or less to the same thing.

In this sense Yarima’s controversial marriage was as dubious technically as it was immoral.

Second, there is the apparent immorality of the cost of the wedding. In Islam, my malam friends say, there is a minimum bride price but there is no ceiling. When, according to one of them, Umar, one of the first four successors of Prophet Muhammad (PBUH), tried at one time to fix a modest ceiling for pride price because he thought its size was making it difficult, if not impossible, for men to marry, he was successfully challenged by a woman who reminded him the prophet never set any ceiling.

Technically speaking, therefore, Yarima did no wrong by paying 100,000.00 dollars or roughly 15,000,000.00 Naira as bride price. Here again, however, the devil is in the context.

Islam unequivocally condemns and forbids profligacy and enjoins modesty and restrain in whatever a Muslim does or says, especially when, like Yarima, he is a leader or considers himself a role model.

Paying a bride price of 15,000,000.00 Naira in a country where the vast majority is said to live on less than a dollar a day is certainly worse than profligate. It borders on the criminal. And that was not the only cost. Because Egypt, even though a Muslim country, forbids marriage of any girl below 18, Yarima reportedly imported at least 30 of the girl’s relations into Abuja for the wedding. That must have cost another, possibly bigger, bundle.

Whatever the imams and Yarima’s supporters may say, his controversial marriage to a girl-child, not for the first time, is essentially an abuse of religion for personal pleasure. It is hard, if not impossible, to defend completely.

Re: Adenaike- a Musketeer at 70

Your column of Wednesday April 21 on Felix Adenaike at 70 was brilliant and a master piece. In that write up you wrote that “Jose had cause to catapult Osoba who had no university degree to the Editorship of Daily Times, then the flagship of Nigerian Journalism. The graduate editors in the stable, some of them Osoba’s seniors didn’t like it.”

First none of his contemporaries then other than Prince Henry Odukomaiya was his senior in terms of entry into journalism. Osoba was appointed Editor Lagos Weekend in Mid 1969 at the same time that Prince Odukomaiya became Editor of The Daily Times.

Educationally, Osoba obtained a Diploma in Journalism after a course of full time study at University of Lagos in 1965 organized by the International Press Institute.

In 1967 he bagged the Fellowship Certificate of the Commonwealth Press Union after a course of study in the UK , part of which took place at Oxford University and Thompson Foundation in Cardiff .

Osoba spent a full academic session 1970/71 in the Department of Journalism at Indiana University Bloomington USA .

He capped his academic career with a full academic year 1974/75 as a post graduate Nigerian Fellow at the famous Ivy League Harvard University in Cambridge Massachusetts USA . Niemen Fellowship is a top rated Post-Graduate Programme for few American journalist.

Osoba is the first Nigerian to obtain the Nieman Fellowship Certificate in Journalism for Harvard University .

Sola Lawal

Senior Special Assistant to Osoba as Governor of Ogun State