While the controversy over child marriage may
be simmering down, there is a much broader conversation that we must have about
the fate of Nigerian children in the context of Nigeria’s federal architecture.
That debate should revolve around the Child Rights Act. Passed in 2003 by the
National Assembly, it is yet to be domesticated in ten states of the
federation, most of which are in Northern Nigeria.
The unremarked subtext of the child marriage
debate is the fact that a number of our national developmental objectives now
fall within the brief of states rather than the federal government. The
military era’s unitary command and control governance is gone and along with it
any possibility of uniform national development. For this reason, much of the
ire directed at the Senate recently in the name of the Nigerian child was
misdirected. Whether a girl in Zamfara or Yobe goes to school or winds up
prematurely as a wife is entirely up to the states involved.
It is significant that even as the debate has
raged in recent weeks, five Northern governors whose states possess some of the
most atrocious social indices with regard to children were traversing the
country parleying with former heads of state and President Goodluck Jonathan in
an effort to resolve the strife in the ruling party. Unofficially, the jaunt is
part of the maneuvering for the 2015 elections. It is sadly often the case that
governance is at the mercy of politics.
This raises the issue of the dereliction of
duty by governors who are rarely found within their states attending to the
affairs of their people. The media itself abets gubernatorial truancy by
disproportionately focusing on the presidency and the federal government and
virtually ignoring what goes on in the states where governors rule in
absolutist fashion. Indeed, the presidency though constitutionally powerful, is
constrained by the legislature, the media’s relentless scrutiny and even the
governors themselves; whereas, the selfsame governors administer their states
like private estates with the media uninterested in their deeds and misdeeds.
If this were not the case, civil society would have taken the errant governors
to task for not having domesticated the Child Rights Act but as things stand
all attention is obsessively focused on the federal government. This is an
important point because by 2015, a number of governors will be vying for the
presidency. We should judge them not by their declared intentions for the
presidency but by their gubernatorial records.
The undue focus on the central government is
also a vestige of the imprint made by overbearing military dictatorships in the
national consciousness. But since 1999, federal democracy has slowly become
more tangible and governors have grown more assertive. The fact is that many of
the issues that directly affect Nigerians fall under the purview of state and
local governments. The media and civil society have been slow to
correspondingly adopt a “federal mentality.”
The key to addressing issues like early
marriage is education. The pervasiveness of early marriage is consistent with
low school enrolment among females. A high incidence of poverty is also
consonant with high female illiteracy which prevents women from being able to
function as autonomous economic actors. States that wish to lower the incidence
of early marriage should consider enacting compulsory primary and secondary
education which would equip girls (and boys) with the tools to be productive
citizens. Secondary education should be the baseline for educational
attainment.
The preponderance of girl-child education in an
area is a fairly accurate predictor of the sustainability of early marriage. A
number of the polemicists who argued in favour of early marriage defended it as
an institution that protects feminine virtue from social immorality. Some of
these arguments were rife with male chauvinism, misogyny and the patriarchal
objectification of women. These quibbles aside, it is worth noting that the
practice of early marriage is itself increasingly linked to rising divorce
rates in Northern Nigeria.
In keeping with the general African view of
marriage as a class statement, men in Northern Nigeria tend to see a new bride
as a status symbol. According to research findings in 2010 by Dr Ismaila Zango,
a sociologist at the Bayero University Kano (BUK), one out of two marriages in
Kano ends in divorce. Similar patterns of matrimonial and family failure
subsist in Sokoto and Katsina states. Vesico-vaginal fistula, a condition that arises
from early pregnancy, is rampant. Over two hundred thousand women nationwide,
the majority of them Northerners, suffer from the disease. Paradoxically,
sufferers of VVF are likely to be divorced by their husbands and thrown out of
their homes. Legions of women divorced for the slightest infraction can be
found on the streets of Kano. With no means of economic empowerment these women
either succumb to destitution or take to prostitution, thus fuelling the
onslaught of HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted plagues. It is a vicious
cycle in every sense. In this instance, far from being a guarantor of feminine
morality, early marriage only leaves females as vulnerable as ever while not
imposing any regulatory discipline on males.
The point of female education is to empower
young women to sustain themselves regardless of their marital status. Educating
girls would render them less vulnerable to the depredations of male patriarchy
and empower them to survive the desperate economic circumstances of divorce.
It is important to note too that despite the
religious colouration given to the debate over child marriage, this is not a
religious matter. Child marriage is not a pillar of Islam. The persistence of
this cultural practice has less to do with the resilience of Islam than with
the low penetration of the North by modernity. In other parts of Nigeria, it is
the march of female education rather than any socio-cultural epiphany that has
drastically reduced the incidence of early marriage; after all, the betrothal
of girls is not unknown to other cultures.
The early marriage of girls is a vestige of the
agrarian social economy which defined early Islamic societies. Economic
activity in agrarian economies being labour-intensive was uniquely suited for
brawny males who as the main economic actors were enjoined to spread an
umbrella of socio-economic protection over the “weaker” womenfolk.
Modernization, industrialization and the knowledge economy which favour brains
over brawn have been characterized by the increasing education of women and
their emergence as competent economic actors. They no longer need the
protective umbrella of the men in the same way as it was during the agrarian
age. This dynamic has yet to fully penetrate the largely rural agrarian reality
of Northern Nigeria where female literacy remains low.
This trend is also reinforced by socio-cultural
institutions. It is often the case that male patriarchy thrives by using its
dominance of instruments like organized religion to control and manipulate the
vulnerable, among them, women and children, whether through early (and forced)
marriages or the institutionalized destitution of children known as almajiri.
It is therefore important that we reject the use of faith to mask or justify
the perpetration of crimes or the perpetuation of retrogression. It is
significant that female literacy is far higher among Muslim communities in
Southern Nigeria than in the North. Iran is a conservative Islamic theocracy
and yet 70 percent of its science and engineering students are women. Across
the Middle East, the taboos against educating women are receding as is the
notion that Islam is a divine license for female subjugation. One need not be a
“feminist” or a “westernized liberal” to appreciate this point. Both Uthman Dan
Fodio who advocated the education of women and his daughter, Nana Asmau, who
was an accomplished intellectual stand out as irresistible examples of
progressive enlightenment.
The objections to the Child Rights Act in the
states yet to domesticate it are also about much more than early marriage.
There is the matter of the Act’s intolerance of child labour, for instance.
Street hawking is something the Act frowns at and yet it remains a fixture of
urban life in much of Nigeria not just in the North. The Child Rights Act is at
the mercy of the tension between legislation and custom. Politics rarely leaps
ahead of culture. When trying to change practices rooted in tradition and
culture, the levers of change have to be localized. This is why ideally,
driving education and ending early marriage are ultimately matters for state
and local governments. It takes agencies of change embedded in the
socio-cultural environment in question to effect transformation from within.
There is only so much that can be accomplished by proclamations in Abuja. The
fate of a young girl in Dirin Daji or Talata Mafara will be shaped less by
remote proclamations in Abuja than by transformative actors in her own
community and municipality. The economics and politics of developmental
transformation are local.
Primary education, in particular, falls under
the ambit of state and local authorities. Yet local governments have been
reduced by governors to being mere lifeless appendages of state governments
thereby crippling their administrative potential. Ironically, the Senate voted
against the proposal for local government autonomy (although it was approved by
the House of Representatives) that would have unshackled municipalities from
the oppressive grip of states and empowered them to drive development from the
bottom up. The Senate’s vote demonstrated a refusal to recognize that only
empowered communities can efficiently generate and distribute developmental
deliverables. The centralized and dysfunctional bureaucracy headquartered in
Abuja simply cannot remotely manage the aspirations of over 160 million people.
The alternative to this is to give the federal
government sweeping powers to enforce the Child Rights Act across the board.
Any serious enforcement effort would surely involve the establishment of a
federal child welfare bureaucracy that sanctions errant families and takes
custodianship of victimized children as wards of the state. This would be a
vast and costly undertaking that would meet with socio-cultural and political
obstruction and likely require authoritarian measures to force through. To
avoid unnecessary conflict and confrontation with federal authorities, this
challenge is probably best managed by states and local governments. In any
case, this administration certainly lacks the enthusiasm, political will and
capacity to embark on such social engineering. It also does not seem likely
that we will witness the federalization of primary and secondary education in
the North to force the issue.
Under the current federal arrangements, the
question of development will be answered mostly by how competently states are
run. Given the lackluster performances of several governors and the disparate
social indices of states, it is clear that divergence in developmental outcomes
will continue to be a facet of our national life. Already, a child born in
Northeastern Nigeria will likely encounter a substantially lower quality of
life that a contemporary born in the Southwest. These disparities pose a
serious challenge to efforts to construct a common citizenship.
How vibrant states are in this new era of
greater responsibility and diminishing oil revenues will be determined by the
vigour of civil society in those states and a new willingness by the media to
interrogate what actually goes on in those states by way of development.
These developmental divergences will either
become the basis for a continuation of the slothful politics of entitlement
that focuses on revenue allocation, more oil money from the centre, and lazy
populist demagoguery or it could lead to the emergence of visionary politics
that focuses on transformative governance, wealth creation, entrepreneurship,
social and economic justice and the obliteration of retrogressive institutions
that entrench poverty.
(All images sourced online)
