IT is very easy to find a woman to marry; what is not easy to find is money to cook soup. That is not a proverb acceptable in some places, definitely not in Kano.
Imagine this: a thousand brides stand. They wait (im)patiently for their grooms to arrive. The men arrive salivating in hot boxers; their roving eyes unwrap their brides; some secretly wish all the babes should be theirs to own and hoe. Let us fast forward the programme. Brides and grooms are eventually seated. Clerics recite the lines, pronounce the celebrators men and wives and cap everything with best wishes. A thousand mouths shout Amin to the clerics prayers for peaceful matrimony.
The sponsors of the wedding then line up the couples. They present them with beds and pillows; cooking and kitchen utensils and other household appliances. Thereafter the new husbands take their brand new wives and off they go into their futures, beginning with the rigorous rites of the other room.
I have just given you a preview of the mass wedding Kano State is likely to hold soon. There would be singing, dancing and plenty to eat and drink. And no, you are not invited. It is already an expensive wedding and we don’t want to increase the budget from N2.5bn. Yes, N2.5bn, you read that right. Kano state government is thinking, planning to spend two billion, five hundred million naira only at one wedding ceremony of many people. I hope all the other state governors heard Kano state government. Really, they need to pay attention.
Imagine Lagos, Imo, Rivers or Ogun state governments volunteering to pick the wedding bills of 1000 couples. Maybe the wedding dresses and suits would also be provided and all the brides and grooms would need to do is just to get themselves to the venue, one big venue, recite their vows and pronto, they become Mr and Mrs. Imagine the free beddings, the kitchen utensils and home appliances. Imagine the stress and months of scrimping and saving the government would have saved the couples and their families from.
So, you see, mass weddings are not bad when you look at all the angles of the concept without bias. Nigeria, let us be honest, has all kinds of cultures that endorse wasteful spending on weddings. A couple living in a face-me-I-face-you mass housing and struggling to pay N300,000 annual rent will go and borrow N800,000 to pay for a six-hour wedding venue. A man who has no car will go and hire the latest SUV that he obtained a loan to pay for; he would arrive at his wedding venue looking like a prince that he is not. The day after the wedding, the couple would wake up to their real reality; the landlord’s harassment, their second-hand clothes; their okada and keke means of transportation.
What is worse, the parents encourage it. The Yoruba parents want their son-in-law to come and marry their daughters n’isu l’oka, yes, with plenty of tubers of yam and bowls of steaming amala for all the guests, invited and uninvited. That is what the culture says and there is nothing wrong with spending money that you have. However, I draw the line. I am even nauseated by the acts of borrowing to fund a see-me-I’m-here one-day event. Misplaced priority in Nigeria, promoted by and via culture is bad enough without government putting an official seal on it. And calling it misplaced priority is actually putting it mildly. I have a list other not-so-nice descriptions for splurging N2.5 billion on a mass wedding. But I am usually nice on Wednesdays.
There are many things Kano needs but this mass wedding thing, to my 2025 mind, is not one of them. True, marriage is important. It is one institution we must protect at all cost but you cannot protect the marriage institution in this time and age by organizing mass weddings. Certainly not for couples that are likely to just see it as a license for mass procreation without responsibility. Do those couples have requisite education, skill and exposure to produce the next ‘batch’ of the Sardauna, Balewa, Kwakwanso, Ganduje, Shekarau, Shettima and the brilliant doctors, professors and engineers I know in Northern Nigeria?
Are those weddings for those who will produce voters or those to be voted for? Are the grooms men who just go into ze ozza room to ride their brides who will eventually produce the next ‘batch’ of unwashed okada riders in Abuja, Jos and in other Nigerian cities? Are we formalizing marriages where the men take off right from the roughened beds after the wedding for Abeokuta and Lagos only to return during the planting season to sow fresh seeds in their wives and on the farms?
Untended farms rile me. A wife left to cry herself to sleep angers me. Are those mass wedding grooms ready to care and cater for wives, children and be heads of families or they just want halal sex, regular sex that the society will not see as sin? Because if these mass weddings are to help those who cannot afford to foot wedding expenses, then we are in trouble, all of us, not just Kano. Why? A man who cannot afford a wedding is a man not ready for marriage and weddings do not a marriage make. Are we raising our girls and boys right? Why help a man marry a wife he cannot afford, build a family he cannot feed and clothe? We cannot continue to deploy old strategies if we want new results.
Why will Kano fund a mass ceremony and go on to buy them wedding beds, and mattresses; pillows and pillows cases? I don’t understand. N2.5billion is a lot of money. Do those brides have jobs, vocations? Will they fend for themselves and the family when their husbands’ finances plunge? What do the men do for a living?
If you join a wheel-barrow pusher and a jobless woman in ‘holy matrimony’ neither the holy nor the matrimony will last the season. Or, you don’t think so? A hungry, angry, frustrated and depressed young wife is likely to turn to drugs or any available vice. There have been stories of despondent ‘amariya’ who stabbed their husbands, poisoned their brand new grooms. There are sadder stories of the swelling ranks of female and young drug addicts. All these and many more should worry us and slow us down a bit in this fixation to just marry people off.
So, ladies and gentlemen, before Kano State government spends that allocated ₦2.5 billion for quarterly mass weddings across the 44 local government areas, let us consider all the angles.
Take the staggering number of out-of-school children. According to a report, approximately 1.9 million children in Kano State are not enrolled in any school, which accounts for about 39% of the total child population in the state. Another source puts the number at 837,479 out-of-school children, ranking it third among states with the highest number of out-of-school children in Nigeria. UNICEF also reported that Kano has nearly one million out-of-school children, with 32% of elementary school-age youngsters not attending school.
And then just on Monday, UNICEF’s Kano Field Office Chief dropped another bombshell. More than a quarter of a million children in Kano have never received routine immunization vaccines, making Kano the the state with the highest number of zero-dose children in Nigeria. In plain language, polio cases are on the increase in Kano. Those 250, 000 children who have never been vaccinated are vulnerable to all kinds of preventable diseases. All these are frightening figures.
I have a strong feeling that most of those children are of illiterate parents who do not understand the value of immunization. Think of what the polio figures will look like if more out-of-school children become adults and are processed off into marriage with state funds. What kind of people are we if we think mass weddings help to solve moral decadence issues and alleviate poverty.
The first time I saw almajiris in the flesh, I wept for hours, was in pains for days. It was at a ‘restaurant’ in Kano where I had gone to have lunch with my colleagues. Then a horde of young boys swooped on the place, eating leftovers, grabbing plates of customers who only got up to adjust the fan or pick a napkin. They were dirty, and as they ate with their grubby unwashed fingers.
Tears welled up in my eyes. I imagined the discomforts of pregnancy, the life-and-death pain of labor, the unspeakable joy of holding your baby in your arms for the first time, the baby’s trusting eyes… How do such babies end up on the streets, walking barefoot on the hot sidewalks, sleeping in uncompleted buildings and eating leftovers? Whose children are those? How did all the 19 governors and military administrators since 1967 miss this problem? Maybe we should just admit that this problem is bigger than a whole state,
If mass weddings are conceived to help low-income families, methinks the state government should do things that will actually lift those families. Can that N2.5billion be spent on vocational trainings and start-up equipment for those low-income people? Can we give them funds to start small-scale businesses? Can we pay more attention to real needs instead of quick fixes that fizzle out with the breeze?
It is only in societies like ours that we are not ashamed of things like helping someone who cannot feed himself get married. If we must organize mass weddings and fund it with taxpayers’ money, can it be for the purpose of planning ahead of tomorrow? Like arranging marriages between families of Nuclear Physicists and a lineage of Medical scholars so we can breed (if we must breed) an uncommon generation of children whose intelligence quotient will be world acclaimed.
What low-income earners need is what promotes them to middle class, what improves their standards of living. Let our leaders tell the people who look up to them the truth, God’s honest truth, not what helps them secure more votes at the polls. I am worried about insinuations in certain quarters that mass weddings are to encourage the mass couples to produce mass children who will become mass voters and mass protesters that can be told to go on suicidal missions with just N1,000! I also have a wicked friend who told me with an evil grin that: “Funke, those candidates of mass weddings will become promiscuous if they don’t find men who will fire them regularly and keep them permanently pregnant.”
The state probably means well but in 2025, mass weddings just sound like an initiative of people from the 12th century, or even from the Stone Age. Kano has come too far to descend this low. It cannot be the state we visited a few years ago and found a health facility with medical equipments that a revered Fellow of the Nigerian Guild of Editors and former governor compared to the ones he saw in St Mary’s Hospital in the United Kingdom. What has happened or is happening to Kano?
- Egbemode, is former President, Nigeria Guild Of Editors, former Commissioner for Information, Osun State, her syndicated column, Intimate Affairs, appears on News Point Nigeria newspaper on Sundays. She can be reached on egbemode3@gmail.com.