Greenhorn preferred to experience?
Eight thousand widows, divorcees and other otherwise unmarried women are already registered with this association and for anyone who takes up the offer there is an approved dowry scale. A dowry of N20,000 must be paid for a teenager, while anyone who chooses a bride between 20 and 35 years of age must pay a […]
Eight thousand widows, divorcees and other otherwise unmarried women are already registered with this association and for anyone who takes up the offer there is an approved dowry scale. A dowry of N20,000 must be paid for a teenager, while anyone who chooses a bride between 20 and 35 years of age must pay a dowry of N15,000 only. If the bride is above 35 years of age, the dowry payable is N10,000.
My only curiosity is why the dowry payable for a bride steadily declines with the age of the bride. A brand new bride that is totally bereft of marital experience attracts a higher dowry than a very experienced bride that has acquired a lot of experience as a wife. A 35 year old divorcee must have produced several children and has already been tried and tested in marriage’s bottom line, which is producing children. So why is a greenhorn more valuable than and a tried and tested person?
Let us put it this way. If you are travelling home for Sallah break, you go to the motor park and there are two vehicles, one driven by a driver with a confirmed driver’s license and many years driving experience while the driver of the second vehicle has only a learner’s permit and a huge “L” sign hanging on the number plate, which car will you enter? Or if you are an air traveller, you go to the airport and you see two planes, one with an elderly looking pilot and the other with a very young pilot fresh out of training school, which plane will you prefer to board?
When a company or a government organization is advertising vacancies in the newspaper, take a good look at the salary attached to the different positions. The positions that are available for a fresh graduate have only a small salary attached to them. But the positions for which several “years of cognate experience” is required always have a high salary and many fringe benefits attached to them. So why is the marriage institution different? Why are a high dowry and more fringe benefits in the form of many boxes of cloth attached to a greenhorn bride while a lower dowry and scaled down boxes of cloth is required to marry an experienced wife? This is the question I will like all Nigerian men to answer.
The conference to nowhere
Even though New Year’s Day [January 1], Democracy Day [May 29] as well as Independence Day [October 1] come around with the regularity of sunrise, it looks like President Goodluck Jonathan’s televised speeches on those occasions, which occur with the regularity of sunset, are always written at the last minute. It looks like the president’s aides in charge of communication forget this assignment until the last minute, and they begin scrambling to write a speech only after the cameras are already assembled.
They must find something for the president to say in his speech. Two years ago, the aides slipped in an item about renaming University of Lagos as Moshood Abiola University, apparently without consulting anyone or so much as reading the enabling law. It backfired. Two days ago, there was another curious item smuggled into the president’s speech. That he was setting up a committee to plan the agenda, structure, name and modalities for a “national dialogue or conference.” As far as we know, only one absent-minded group led by Professor Ben Nwabueze visited Aso Rock recently and asked for this conference. Did the president ask other groups whether they want this conference any more than he consulted the Senate and Council of Unilag before he changed its name to MAU? Let us see whether this one fares any better.