The limits of indecency

If you thought our collective standards of decency and propriety cannot possibly be made worse, the spectacle the nation witnessed last week at the House of Representatives would have proved you wrong. It was a few minutes of historic infamy, a shame we should feel for eternity and a desecration that reminds us all that […]

If you thought our collective standards of decency and propriety cannot possibly be made worse, the spectacle the nation witnessed last week at the House of Representatives would have proved you wrong. It was a few minutes of historic infamy, a shame we should feel for eternity and a desecration that reminds us all that we are indeed being led by people who have no pretensions to deserving our respect. It reminded the nation of the damaged mentality of the worst specie of the Nigerian man, the sorry type who struts around with this mentality that women were created for him to do as we wishes, and show them off as his prize. Above all, it reveals the gaping wounds inflicted on our values by the perverse democracy we practice, the type that sucks in and corrupts everything we value.

Painful as it is, I will have to describe this tragic parody for those who have not thrown up already. The video of this shame has already gone viral. It opens with the House Leader, Ado Doguwa (the third highest ranking member in the House of Representatives) standing on the floor of the House and ordering four women sitting at the far end of the chamber to stand up. ‘Mr Speaker’, he shouted, ‘Mr Speaker, I have invited my four wives to come to this chamber and pay their respects’. All Members turned round to look at four well-fed women stand up one by one as Duguwa called out their names. ‘Mr Speaker, the reason why I came with my four wives here is to show that when they call me a powerful parliamentarian, I am not just powerful in the House, am also powerful at home’. As his colleagues giggled and shouted encouragement, Speaker Gbajabiamila banged his gavel to lower the volume of manly childishness, chuckling encouragement. ‘Mr Speaker, these four wives you see have produced twenty seven children for me, and I am still counting’. The chamber roared him on.

Two minutes of agonizing embarrassment that will out-match the weeping admission of a former Speaker who had been called out for forging a university degree certificate, is now a permanent record of our shame. Alhassan Ado Doguwa representing Doguwa/Tudun Wada federal constituency in Kano State had just scraped through in a election that had to be repeated on the orders of the court. He had been retained as Majority Leader by members of his party.  His is in a very powerful position, one he could put to great use in raising the tone of a legislature that had long lost the battle for honour and relevance among Nigerians. He is powerful enough to demand that Speaker Gbajabiamila allows him to strip on the floor, and he would have his way.

In truth, Honourable Doguwa did strip on the floor. In most circumstances, a Hausa Muslim man like Doguwa will fight with his life to shield his wife or wives from exposure that is discouraged by his faith. Female Muslims are allowed to mix with men under conditions, one of the most important being that they are appropriately dressed and the purposes of the mixing do not deepen their vulnerability or expose them to abuse. Displaying your wives to your colleagues to boast of your prowess offends all standards of acceptable conduct, and Allah does not make separate rules for strong male politicians. He treated his wives as chattel, demeaning them as producers of children and vehicles that vindicate his sexual credentials before an audience that substantially had its stereotype of the Hausa-Muslim man pretty much cut and dried. He did not present a family to colleagues, but four women that appeared powerless to resist being paraded as stripes of sexual ego, and producers of 27 children, not one of whom was there in the chamber.

It turns out that this embarrassing outing of Hon Doguwa The Powerful and his posse of child producers has some links with local politics in Kano. More specifically, people say it was part of an on-going spat between Sarkin Kano Muhammadu Sanusi II and a section of the community he leads, supported, naturally, by the APC government of Ganduje to which Doguwa is strongly alligned. The Emir has been making some telling comments on what is acceptable and what is abuse of the regulations related to polygamy in Islam, or, more specifically, the way it is largely practiced in Kano and Hausaland. The Emir had stepped on toes when he said men who cannot support more than one wife have no business marrying more. He had made other comments on the manner children are born and cared for in a society with little heart or time for the vulnerable child. These had been registered as hostile, intrusive and insensitive in a conservative society, fueled by the notion promoted by a state government that believes that the best Emir is seen, not heard.

If this was the fight which Doguwa extended to Abuja, he could not have made a more idiotic decision. The institution he is serving for the fifth time may have made it possible for him to marry four wives and support 27 children (and counting).The debate about responsible polygamy is not about him although even people like him should be concerned about their responsibilities to four wives and 27 children while they politic round the clock and make as much money as they can get away with. The debate is about men who capitalize on the weaker position of women to offer them marriage that makes them desperate mothers, and nothing more. It is about millions of children walking the streets and becoming Almajirai because parents have little or no time to look after them, or they relieve themselves of the responsibilities of caring for them by sending them away to beg for the barest of existence.

The House Leader did not bring four Almajirai into the chamber and asked the chamber to take a look at the people who represent part of the face of our future. He could have reminded wealthy legislators that they also represent the Almajiri, and in his own case, he has a special reason to worry because Kano State has three million Almajirai, a few of them quite capable of shutting out his 27 children (and counting) from enjoying a peaceful and secure future. He did not come to the chamber with four 12-year-old girls who will soon be married off without the prospect  of acquiring education or skill. They will join the child production assembly line. He could have brought four unemployed graduates, young people suckered into the falsehood that going to school bridges the gap between privilege and the lack of it when it comes to getting employed on graduation. He could have brought in a number of young drug addicts who are part of an epidemic eating into the very heart of Kano society.

Doguwa has made an irredeemable mockery of Nigerian legislators. He provided comic relief for colleagues, ridiculing his wives and himself in a manner that even his children may bow their heads in shame. What he has not done was to make the legislature look worse in the eyes of Nigerians. That will take a lot more than the Speaker lending his gavel to a leader to make nonesense of his culture, his faith and the carcass of a legislature that could not be worse.