As the state takes over marriage

Several newspapers reported last Friday that 8,000 widows, divorcees and other hard-pressed women converged at the Hisbah Commission’s office in Gusau and demanded for a Kano-style government-sponsored mass wedding for themselves. Even though the reports did not say that equally hard-pressed Zamfara men had joined in the demonstrations, I suspect that they were watching the […]

Several newspapers reported last Friday that 8,000 widows, divorcees and other hard-pressed women converged at the Hisbah Commission’s office in Gusau and demanded for a Kano-style government-sponsored mass wedding for themselves. Even though the reports did not say that equally hard-pressed Zamfara men had joined in the demonstrations, I suspect that they were watching the women’s rally with more than a passing interest. As Ronald Reagan once said, “It takes two to tango.”
The leader of Zamfara State’s Amalgamated Association of Widows and Divorcees, a man, said his association has registered 5,380 divorcees and 2,220 widows. Some of them have been unmarried for many years, he said. In keeping with these lean times, he said the dowry payable for these women is N20,000 for teenage girls, N15,000 for 20-35 year olds and N10,000 for those older than 35. I was just wondering; on this age-determined sliding scale of marital worthiness, the dowry could drop to N500 by the time the prospective bride is 60.
Whatever happened to this country’s IMF-dictated privatization program? In an age when the government is supposed to be giving up its vice-like grip of key economic sectors, how come that it is taking over a sector such as marriage which has been private for hundreds of years? Now, the part that really puzzled me was the suggestion that Zamfara State should play catch up with Kano State in this matter of social innovation. Early in this Republic, most Nigerians’ attention with respect to Zamfara State was about Shari’a, but people like me who always travelled through Zamfara State knew better because Alhaji Ahmed Sani, Yariman Bakura was the first governor in the North to procure 7,000 motorcycles for distribution to young men for use as intra-city commercial transport. He probably got the idea when thousands of achaba riders did stunts at his election campaign rallies.
Within a few years most Northern states followed Yarima’s example, some-times reluctantly. In 2001 or so, a political thug in Kaduna complained to me that PDP youths went to the star-performing Governor Ahmed Makarfi and demanded for similar motorcycles. The stoic technocrat that he is, Makarfi said he would not sanction a city transport system based on motorcycles. Imagine my amazement when I went to the Sir Kashim Ibrahim House in Kaduna one day in 2003 and saw several thousand brand new motorcycles glistening in its expansive courtyard. Makarfi had procured 10,000 of them for distribution to civil servants and youths just before the 2003 elections. Under pressure, he caved in to the Zamfara formula.
Under Governor Rabi’u Kwankwaso, Kano State introduced the art of the mass wedding into Nigeria. It had been popularized in South Korea by the Moonies. With Kwankwaso’s active encouragement and participation, the Kano State Hisbah Board has found husbands for over one thousand widows and divorcees and married them off in grand ceremonies. Once better known for intercepting and smashing beer trucks, the Kano Hisbah Board has now become the largest match-making office in Nigeria, upstaging all the traditional match-making methods in Hausaland.
My only worry is, how viable is it to make a marriage match-up in a government office? Finding husbands for daughters has always been a top family priority in Hausaland and families have evolved many ways of doing this. Aunties, neighbours and even far-flung relatives all play a role in the search. In addition we have the kara, where young men and women meet in an open space after dusk to size up one another. The coming of Western schools and modern work places provided extra match-making sites, as did cars through the instrument of “giving a lift.”
Now, finding a husband for a divorcee is a little bit trickier than finding one for a teenager, but how can a government office trump the traditional methods? Can a Hisbah official minuting into a file really do the trick?  The way things are going, it may not be long before all marriage match-making in this land is outsourced to laptops, iPads and blackberries.
The impression we got when we were growing up was that marriage is done because of love. All the local as well as foreign story books that we read reinforced that impression. Falling in love is a tricky business in the best of times. Never mind that no one has as yet successfully defined what “love” is. You only get an idea of what it is when you fall in it. The most interesting definition of love that I ever read was the one supplied by some American biochemists in the 1990s. They discovered that the hormone pathways involved in falling in love are the same as those involved in drug addiction. In other words, a love-struck young man or woman is no different from a heroin addict, biochemically speaking.
How can this high passion called love be generated in a government office full of files? Widowhood is one thing but marrying a divorcee requires some investigation to find out why her previous marriage failed. This is social due diligence. How can this be accomplished in a file? One begins to suspect that by asking the state government to nationalize the processes of marriage, the Zamfara divorcees have thrown love overboard and are marrying for other reasons. What could these be? Surely, having a governor attend your wedding is a classy thing. In Kano, the great emir also attends as the father of all the brides. Kwankwaso not only attends these weddings but he pays the dowry. This is a big attraction because in Hausaland these days, prospective bridegrooms are so hard up that some marriages are contracted while the groom still owes the dowry. At least the governor pays the dowry cash down.
Kwankwaso does more than that. In addition to paying all the expenses of the mass wedding fatiha, the women are also given some tools and money to start a small business. This seems to be the biggest attraction of all in these hard times for both the wives and husbands. Although a small scale business is meant to stabilize families, I urge the Hisbah Board to investigate if it does not unwittingly destabilize Kano’s families. I say this because a Hausa family is an authoritarian institution held in place by both a religious cover and the husband’s firm control of family income. As the women acquire independent means of income, families in Kano could begin to assume the democratic character of Californian families.
As for Zamfara State, some people are alleging that Governor Abdulaziz Yari does not have the “open palms” of his predecessor and mentor, Yariman Bakura.  This is an unfair charge. One day in 2005, I saw Yari at the Gusau Government House. It was an unforgettable spectacle. When he emerged from Governor Ahmed Sani’s office, at least three dozen people enveloped his vehicle, a Toyota jeep. He managed to get into the vehicle with great difficulty and as it zoomed off, a dozen people clung to its fenders, doors and the spare tyre attached to the jeep’s back. The window glasses were rolled down as he went. Yari is an adept grassroots political operator; why did the Zamfara widows and divorcees have to embark on a demonstration to get his ear?
The way things are going, government-organised mass weddings will soon envelop all the Northern states the way commercial motorcycles dotted our city streets early last decade. In Nigeria here, the government is not yet privatizing. It is still nationalizing things.