The Esse story: Abduction or elopement?
Abduction or elopement, that is the question begging for answers as social media tore through our fragile unity for Esse Oruru. Teenagers live in lalaland where love is the other side of infatuation and everyone who gives them attention fits the picture of the ideal husband or wife to satisfy the ideal of living happily […]
Abduction or elopement, that is the question begging for answers as social media tore through our fragile unity for Esse Oruru. Teenagers live in lalaland where love is the other side of infatuation and everyone who gives them attention fits the picture of the ideal husband or wife to satisfy the ideal of living happily ever after. Nothing could go wrong.
With those words, let us put together the Esse Oruru saga and attempt to sieve the wheat from the chaff of our collective bigotry and benumbing bile for one another’s culture and religion, a mutual loathing exacerbated by politics.
Esse’s mother fits the rural mother operating a roadside eatery aka buka where her beautiful teenage daughter helps curious customers one of who is Kano-born 18-year-old Yunusa Yellow. Like all teenagers playing hanky-panky with raging hormones, Esse is soon infatuated with Yunusa in a tango of Romeo and Juliet. The two know that they stand a better chance of climbing mouth Everest without a harness than getting parental consent to marry given their age and background. Like all teenagers they couldn’t wait for years to test the truth of what they feel. So, Yunusa persuaded his love-struck teenager to elope with him to Kano.
Question one is – was Yunusa conscious of the dual legal system, which lowers the age of consent in Naija? At 18 he is a major, but either at 14 or 17 his lover is a minor. The Criminal Code, operational in the south sets the age of consent at 18 while the Penal Code operational in the north sets it at sixteen.
Was Yunusa a prince or another almajiri? In most parts of the south, northerners are all almajiri. When Yunusa brought home his ‘bride’, his tale went to the Sharia Council, which endorsed it according to its warped interpretation of the Sharia, nevertheless, the village head referred the matter to Emir Sanusi Lamido Sanusi for adjudication. Sanusi is not just a modern emir; he is lettered expert in Sharia law.
Emir Sanusi would have nothing of it. He ordered one of his palace dogari to take this infatuated lovebird to the police to provide cover for her safe return to Bayelsa. It is the right thing to do. Having given his verdict, the Emir had no reason to believe that his orders would not be respected. Only an enquiry would reveal whether the AIG respected the law. All these events happened in September 2015 ostensibly unknown to Esse’s parents who kept searching for their daughter. Their cry got to the ears of NGOs who brought it to social media limelight. All hell broke lose.
Why you may ask? Because in the consciousness of some, when a northerner is president his kinsmen do not play by the rules. Two, a similar case involving the conversion and marriage of a consenting adult daughter of a pastor had gone viral leading to the question – whether this is an Islamic onslaught of a northern oligarchy drunk with the born-to-rule mentality. Third, wasn’t it said recently that Emir Sanusi married a graduate teenager? Fourth, Emir Sanusi was in Mecca where the president was performing the lesser hajj, the duo must have sealed the deal in the holy land!
Monday night, it was confirmed that Esse would be taking her first flight to Abuja to be reunited with her parents. The matter ought to have ended like that but not in Naija’s fractured society where one clan or ethnic nationality thinks it is superior to the other and religious zealots are eager to spill each other’s blood just to save their own belief.
Examined dispassionately, Yunusa is guilty of the offense of abduction, but his parents or guardians carried out cultural due diligence. If Esse had been a Yagba girl, or vice versa, our elders would have sent her back with a high-powered delegation and hired mediators from the other culture, ready to pay fines and seek peace. They would have asked Esse to stay under her parent’s watch until she’s matured enough to make informed consent. But not all my readers are Yagba and to subject them to the rules of my elders would be the height of hypocrisy because as Matumbi says – everyman do his thing a little way different.
Emir Sanusi did due diligence. He stood by the law, but even at that some people want his turban removed from his head – why? His former role as CBN governor chipped at the foundation of PDP’s house of cards. His sins are not forgiven. The IG was perhaps treading softly; careful not to offend the new ruling class to whom he owes his pips. A proper investigation and appropriate sanction could redeem this image.
We are so fractured that we use every opportunity to unleash bottled-up ethno-religious bile across social media. Naija belongs to all of us, nobody is born to rule or better than the other. Religion is a personal thing and should not be imposed. As long as we have a nation, we would comingle, inter-relate and intermarry. We should reduce tension by reacting only after we have heard the whole story. This is a clear case of elopement, NOT abduction. Let the law takes its course.