On Muhammed Sanusi II and his “Adult” Wife.

Yes, she’s eighteen! Yes, she’s an adult and yes, she’s entitled to make decisions. She can marry when she wants. But, let’s call a spade a spade: she still needs guidance about marital choices and decisions.

         Imagine a young girl, your cousin, your sister, or your child’s friend, comes to you on a sunny Sunday afternoon and tells you that she wants to marry a fifty-four year old man, what would you say? I would advice her to try to reconsider her decisions, I’d say focus on achieving a concrete goal before stepping into that colossal institution called marriage. Also, I’d advice her that, as a teenager, she may find it very difficult to cope with marital challenges and its strange responsibilities.

         However, if she decides to get married to the said man, what can one do? One must ask about the man who has the rakish qualities to charm this young rose.

 The man in question is one Emir of Kano, Mohammed Sanusi II, and the former governor of Nigeria’s Central bank. The same man who, in his 2013 TEDx Talk, spoke about harnessing “potentials” of the next generation. Ironically, this is the same man tying an eighteen-year old potential.

I’m guessing before their marriage, they courted, that is, a period when they went on dates in order to understand each other and maybe, taste each other. It must be the same in the case of our Emir, or did he wake up one morning and decided to marry his wife, Sadiya, without dates, smooches and kisses? If they went through the courting stage, when did it start?

Religious and cultural bigots would argue that it’s acceptable for Sanusi to add a teenage girl, if he wants, to his fleet of wives. However, in a country where, in the North particularly, the gender gap remains particularly wide and the proportion of girls to boys in school ranges from 1 girl to 2 boys to 1 to 3 in some States, one would expect the educated emir to chill, at least, till the girl graduates from university or from a post-graduate program. How are we to solve the dearth of female education if the leaders pluck young girls at their prime?

Sadiya, should be in school and, not gambolling in the hands of sugar daddy. Period!

 Let’s do an educational maths here: from age four to age ten, a Nigerian child should get primary education; from age ten to sixteen, that same child should have got her secondary school education and from sixteen to twenty, the same child should have got her university education (that is, without strikes).

I wish Sadiya’s parents stepped in and told her to focus on achieving a more worthy goal than throwing her life in the hands of an older man. Sadiya should start training to defeat jealousy, inequality and arguments in her marital home because it comes with the polygamous territory and she must be ready to play the game to win.