More of Uju Kennedy -Ohanenye; less of Tinubu
The stand of Minister Uju Kennedy-Ohanenye for mass education before mass marriage recommends itself as a desired policy that must enter our constitution.
Minister of Women Affairs, Mrs Uju Kennedy-Ohanenye
Mrs Uju Kennedy-Ohanenye is the Minister of Women Affairs. She is an appointee of Bola Ahmed Tinubu who is the president of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. Kennedy-Ohanenye holds her stay in office to the pleasure of Bola Tinubu whom Nigerians elected to pilot the affairs of the federation till 2027, God willing when there will be another election. But like John the Baptist, the forerunner of Jesus Christ in the biblical account, Uju must increase and Bola Tinubu must decrease. When John the Baptist said that of himself, he meant that in influence his ministry must wane and that of Jesus must assume the limelight.
Uju Kennedy-Ohanenye is Igbo while her boss Bola Tinubu is Yoruba. Both are making their marks in taking the nation, Nigeria out of the woods. The thickest wood that must be cut down in Nigeria is the wood of religion and tribalism. Tribalism and religious bigotry have stood between Nigeria and greatness. When people refer to certain personalities as the founding fathers of Nigeria, I wink because I'm quite convinced that Nigeria has not been born and therefore couldn't have had a father or fathers. Nigeria is a geographical space still begging for a father. What we had at independence are three men who were competing for their individual ambitions. Late Chief Obafemi Awolowo unarguably the most cerebral of the three still had his soul among the Yoruba, his race. Though he thought he could replicate the mark he made in his Western Region at the national level, his other two colleagues, Nnamdi Azikiwe and Ahmadu Bello were envious and suspicious of him; they stopped him.
Though brilliant, Nnamdi Azikiwe was more interested in the dominance of his Igbo stock in Africa than the greatness of the whole of Nigeria. Nothing moved Sir Ahmadu Bello than his religion. He thought more of diping the Quran in the Atlantic Ocean which is in the South of Nigeria. His preference was to be the Sultan of Sokoto than the Prime Minister of Nigeria. So when his party, the Northern People's Congress (NPC) won the elections, he rather stayed in his beloved North where Islamic religion of the type that is peculiar only to Nigeria-the type that retards, than come to Lagos, the then federal capital, to pilot a united Nigeria. Though the most powerful man politically in Nigeria, he sent one of his lieutenants, Tafawa Balewa to be Prime Minister in Lagos.
Former Prime Minister of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew saw the ugly arrangement and predicted that Nigeria would not go far. And the geographical space did not go well as it was terminated six years after independence in a dawn coup executed by some elements of the Nigerian Army. Since then the twin evils of tribalism and religious bigotry have been looking for a Messiah to cure the diseases. Bola Ahmed Tinubu recently spent 90 billion naira to subsidize the pilgrimage of a few thousand Muslims to Saudi Arabia. A Nigerian has calculated that 90 billion naira will build ten types of the electricity plant built by Professor Barth Nnaji that is supplying nine local government areas in Abia State with round-the-clock electricity, the first in the nation. With 90 billion naira President Bola Tinubu can build ten electricity plants in ten state capitals and if he continues to do that periodically, in four years he would have built those plants in all 36 states and Abuja. Yet Bola Tinubu promised during his campaign that Nigerians should not give him a second term if he didn't give them electricity in four years. Electricity consumption is now stratified courtesy of Bola Tinubu's Minister of Power, Adebayo Adelabu showing clearly that some animals are greater than others in Nigeria. Stratified electricity distribution and a crushing inflation at 33 percent have set Nigerians in great agony.
Why did Bola Tinubu do that? He is well aware of the benefit which a 24-hour supply of electricity can do to uplift industrialization and solve the economic problem in the nation. Is Bola Tinubu a religious bigot by his preference to subsidize just a few thousand Muslims in Nigeria on a religious pilgrimage? No, he is not as he is said not to know even the first verse to recite when a Muslim embarks on his prayer. Why is Tinubu wasting the country's scarce resources? He removed the subsidy on fuel which is enjoyed by all 200 million Nigerians thereby throwing the economy out of gear. The clear answer of the majority of Nigerians at least from the south and middlebelt of Nigeria is that Tinubu is afraid of the Muslim North. He would do anything as virtually all that have led the country have done, military and civilian since independence, to placate the ever restive North. There is a feeling that the North has to be pampered if the country will hold together. The North is the only place in Nigeria where anything can be done even it is not legal. When the North sneezes, the south catches cold. The North is over-populated and less productive. With the large population she wins elections for her unprogressive leadership who does nothing to improve the lot of her ever increasing poor. The North observes the law in the breach. It is the only place where law collectively made for the nation is not obeyed, where Sharia law takes precedence over the main laws of the nation, where a senator who joined in making that law refuse to obey it. Senator Ahmed Sanni Yerima from Zamfara State would rather marry an eight-year-old Egyptian girl and when his colleagues sought to tame that attitude shouted that he was being marginalized because he’s a Muslim. Everybody kept quiet.
Under the Child Rights Act 2003, the minimum legal age of marriage is 18 years. However, out of 36 Nigerian States, there were still 12 (11 of which are located in the north of the country) that have not included the Child's Rights Act 2003 in their internal legislation. It follows that in those States local laws are applied, most of which are Islamic Law provisions, and the minimum age of marriage in some of those States is as low as 12 years.
Again the North is the place from where a legislator took his four wives to the National Assembly showcasing them and announced to the nation that he has 28 children and promised to have more. The North is the place where other religions do not enjoy enough freedom whereas the law provides for freedom of religion. The North is the place where anybody can be killed in the name of Islam and the case will meet with a brickwall in the courts.
The North is the place where the Imams and Sheiks are more powerful than the elected representatives of the people. The North is where the police had better be afraid of the religious leaders if he wants to keep his head safe. The North is where even the governors are afraid of the religious leaders because they are their marabouts. The North must be heard, the North must be listened to but the North listens to nobody. When the master dribbler General Ibrahim Babangida, a northerner manoeuvred to avoid handing over power to the presumptive winner of June 12, 1993 presidential election, late Chief M.K.O Abiola, a southerner, one of reasons he gave in a meeting he organized with his confidant, Professor Omo Omoruyi, a political scientist was a warning from late Ibrahim Dasuki, a former Sultan of Sokoto and a close associate of the powerful Ahmadu Bello, the Sardauna of Sokoto and the only premier of the vast North. Dasuki warned Babangida not to handover power to Abiola, a Yoruba so as not to reverse "the achievements Ahmadu Bello made for the North." Omo Omoruyi chronicled this and many others in his book, "The TALE OF JUNE 12 - The betrayal of the Democratic Rights of Nigerians.” Babangida was infuriated in the course of the meeting conveyed to help him out of the quagmire he had gotten himself into by many failed promises to Nigerians to handover power to a democratically elected government. So annoyed was IBB that he banged his huge desk in his Aso Rock office shouting "not here, not here." According to Omoruyi, IBB was angry because some Yoruba who worked at the presidency had been congratulating themselves that the 'rankadede,' an Hausa greeting for a king was soon to change for 'kabiyesi,’ a Yoruba greeting for kings. That statement simply typify the political effect of tribalism in Nigeria and the North’s paranoia.
This is the grave disease that has kept Nigeria from becoming a great nation, and one sickness that must be cured. Who will cure this disease? Babangida prided himself as one who would but he ended up as a cowardly general and an ethnic jingoist who could not die for his nation but lives only for himself and family. Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, former two-term president also announced himself for the rescue but he also ended on the self-preservation agenda. But Uju Kennedy-Ohanenye, is exuding an attitude that could get Nigeria out of this rut. Surprisingly she is from a part of the country from which that attitude could hardly be believed to be in surplus. She is Igbo, a part of the nation the North has either planned to cow or cajole to perpetual second fiddle. Minister Uju exuded great boldness on behalf of Nigeria when recently she called the bluff of the behemoth North in another attempt to foist ignorance and illiteracy on the nation. A section of Niger State planned to marry off 100 orphaned girls away to men they may not choose. Uju said no: "Mass education must be preferred before mass marriage." Despite abuses and name-calling from the clerics from that part of Niger State, Uju stood her ground, went to court to obtain an injunction to stop the mass wedding.
With unexpected humility, the Speaker, Niger State House of Assembly, Abdul Malik Sarkindaji who had been contacted to finance the mass marriage of the 100 orphaned girls and had accepted and the Emir of Kontangora, Alhaji Muhammad Barau Mu'azu II quietly went to the minister in her Abuja office and made peace, seeking alternative resolution of the crisis apart from the court. We must praise the humility of these gentlemen: their actions show that the North can change from its conservative and retrogressive ways which other Islamic experts have said is not totally Islamic and which has not paid the North itself, rather leaving her far behind other regions of the nation in education and development.
Even when former president Muhammadu Buhari came with his pro-north policy, the North is still left devasted in insurgency, banditry and abject poverty. We must also praise the local structure in the North that takes care of orphaned girls but we must ask, what has been happening to orphaned boys? Where are they? The stand of Minister Uju Kennedy-Ohanenye for mass education before mass marriage recommends itself as a desired policy that must enter our constitution. Religion must not be funded by any government in Nigeria. That must be in the constitution also. More of Uju, less of Tinubu.
Tunde Akande is both a journalist and pastor. He earned a Master's degree in Mass Communication from the University of Lagos