A woman after my own heart

I decided to write on a woman who has restored my faith in possibilities that can be created by women who decide to swim against the tide. You will never guess who she is. She is not Theresa May, although I admire tenacity. Not Oby Ezekwesili, although I respect courage. Not Najaatu Mohammed, although I appreciate […]

I decided to write on a woman who has restored my faith in possibilities that can be created by women who decide to swim against the tide. You will never guess who she is. She is not Theresa May, although I admire tenacity. Not Oby Ezekwesili, although I respect courage. Not Najaatu Mohammed, although I appreciate consistency in public life. Not even Aisha Buhari, although I admire the strength to step out where necessary. We have identical names, Jamila Abubakar, but I wish we have more in common. I wouldnt know if we do, because she came to me only as a small story in the papers. Just a few words about her, but for me, and I hope for millions in the North, this woman’s story wrote volumes in courage and propriety.

Jamila Abubakar was reported to have been divorced by her husband because, according to him, she would not relocate from Kaduna to his village of Kargi with him and their two children. She went to a Shari’a Court in Kaduna a few weeks after the divorce to ask the court to stop her former husband from enrolling their two boys in itinerant Islamic schools (almajirci). She said she had personally enrolled both boys into Islamic and    Western-type schools in Kaduna where they were doing well. The report said the husband had denied enrolling the children in almajirci schools. The judge certified the divorce document and ordered the husband to produce the children in court the next week. This is where the story stopped, although it will almost certainly continue to attract media attention. At least I hope so, because a lot is at stake.

There is a marriage that has come to an end, one in possibly thousands in single day in Hausaland, a region with one of the highest divorce rates in the world. The court could facilitate reconciliation if one or both parties show an inclination for it, and if it does not violate the Islamic laws on marriage and divorce. There could also be a tussle over custody of the children, even though the law is clear on the mother’s right to custody unless she is proved incompetent or incapable of bringing up young children from the marriage as protected and responsible adults. There could be issues around responsibility for support by the father where the husband appears reluctant, and the wife with custody insists on enforceable agreements. The man could simply send the children over to the wife who dared to take him to court over his children, and wash his hands off everything to do with mother and children. Mediators could intervene and prevent a judicial resolution.

All these are possible, but these are staples of everyday life. What is unusual, and hence a matter of tremendous interest, is that a typical Hausa Muslim wife had stood up against her husband’s reported desire to contribute their children to a tradition that represents the biggest threat to the future of a developing and secure northern Nigeria. Jamila’s two boys would have joined about 15 million others who combine the search for Islamic learning with life in the extremes of poverty and neglect. These millions of child beggars, conceived and delivered by loving parents are consigned to childhood and young life as beggars who learn very little that prepares them for productive lives as adults. Their choices are made for them by parents who believe that a wretched, loveless existence is an integral part of learning, a necessary preparation for a good next life.

Jamila’s society grows faster than most in the world and also produces the largest number of child pupil-beggars. Deeply popular polygamy without social or legal restraints around responsibilities to shoulder large families by poor fathers in a patriarchal setting creates alarming burgeoning of young people. The predominant religion in the region is Islam, and Islam places primacy on learning. Centuries of the practice of handing over very young children to teachers, most of whom live entirely off the scrapings of the children they shepherd away to great distances from parents, has refused to die down. In fact, it has become a distinguishing hallmark of quite possibly the largest Islamic sect in West Africa, with Nigeria being home to tens of millions of its adherents. Pre-colonial Jihad failed to eradicate it. Colonialism left it untouched, even though it made strides in providing alternatives, with varying doses of Islamic education. Nigerian leaders that took over from the colonialists lacked the will to take on the sects that supported the child itinerant education. In fact many politicians built their support bases from leaders of these sects.

The child-beggar-student grew in number, fed from poor political will and the tragic failure of the political economy of northern Nigeria to integrate the peasant class into the modern economy and society. Substantially left to eke a living by a parasitic state, the peasant lived pretty much by his own values. The modern state lacked the moral and legal powers to enforce radical changes in his life, particularly in the manner he treated his family. Neither prepared for a mordernizing economy nor trained to fit into one defined by skills and modern education, almajiri grows up scraping an existence and reproducing himself. He is the huge liability that could have been the region’s grearest asset. He sharpens the class divisions in society, feeding the class of the poor and dragging down the process of creating a sustainable middle class. He became the face of the North, that perplexing question over a phenomenon that has no place in Islam, yet exists because it is protected as a key element of the faith.

This is the institution Jamila Abubakar stood up against. Next time you see a five-year old hungry child in rags holding a plastic bowl begging, please remember this brave woman. That child could quite possibly be in a home with parents in a walking distance from Islamic and western school. Tell people about this lady, so that more mothers could assert themselves and persuade fathers to keep children at home. Marriages do not have to break up because mothers persuade fathers to keep children at home. We have all wondered how the mothers of these children let them go into dangerous and wretched existence. This brave lady shows not all mothers acquiesce. If the state cannot do it because it lacks the moral basis and the political will; if the love of the father is not enough to  prevent tearing  a four-year old from home, let us appeal to mother’s love. Jamila Abubakar saved two children from almajirci. Imagine what thousands of Jamilas will do.

Jamila Abubakar wrote this piece from Abuja