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The news that a forty-nine year old
Senator married a thirteen-year-old child has once again thrust Nigeria
into the limelight of the international media.

Recently, I saw the
Senator on Al Jazeera, proudly defending his actions. Senator Sani
Yerima’s argument was based solely on the fact that Prophet Muhammad of
his Islamic faith married a girl of nine as stated in the Koran;
therefore, “any Muslim who marries a girl of nine years and above is
following the teaching and practice of Prophet Muhammad (PBUH)”. The
Senator’s main argument for his case is that “his religion” allows it.

Marriage in our
society is not regulated by “religion” but mostly by our customs and
traditions, that is why traditional marriages are still a big part of
our culture.

Regardless of
religion, many couples still have to do a traditional marriage for
their union to be properly recognised. In all societies, the rules for
what traditions are to be observed change with time, as society evolves.

Gone are the days
when “cows” and “crops” could be exchanged as dowry. These days, our
fathers work in offices; they have no need for animals. They do not
even have land for the cows to graze upon. Our society has changed. We
shall make do with cash. While many customs can still be observed,
these days, nobody stands outside a hut waiting for the groom to appear
with a red stained cloth. We shall make do with wishing them a safe
journey on their honeymoon. Yes, as time changes, customs and
traditions change.

It is therefore no
surprise that the marriages performed between the years 570 and 632,
were governed by the traditions and customs of that society, and
limited to that society. In those days, they had no idea why their
women died at alarming rates during childbirth. They did not know what
a hemorrhage was, or sepsis, or pregnancy-induced hypertension. They
had no idea of preeclampsia and eclampsia, or obstructed labour caused
by cephalopelvic disproportion, or iron-deficiency anemia.

They had no idea
why many young women, after giving birth, would begin to leak urine or
faeces through the vagina. This of course, we know today as obstetric
fistula, (a tear between the vagina and the urinary tract or rectum)
which occurs when the pelvic growth of a woman is not complete.

It is common
knowledge, that when people know better, they do better. We all
function according to our abilities and knowledge at a particular time.
Hence, one cannot blame these mothers and fathers who were merely
following the traditions of their fathers and fore fathers before them.

As their young
daughters died, they prayed that their God would one day give their
descendents the knowledge and wisdom to prevent such deaths. Their God
answered their prayers. Finally, these deaths could be prevented, it
was a simple solution. Our ancestors, who had lost their beautiful
daughters, wondered at their own ignorance! Was that all we had to do?
To wait until our daughters became women? Oh! How ignorant we were! The
reason why young girls should not be married at such young ages has
nothing to do with religion, or what is right or wrong before the eyes
of God. It has nothing to do with customs or traditions; it is quite
simply, a health issue.

It is illogical
for any human being, to endanger the life of another, simply because
once upon a time, in another era, it was allowed to marry a girl of
nine. People then, did not know better.

I remember when I
was thirteen, my number one and main interest was climbing trees and
plucking “ebelebor” (Indian almonds). The main agenda for my day was
PLAY, PLAY,

PLAY! There are
many things you lose in life and get back, but a childhood is something
nobody can ever get back. To lose your childhood, is to lose an
essential part of your being. This is the only time in life when we can
be truly ourselves, without the pressures and expectations of society.
To rob a child of all that, is unforgivable.

If Senator Yerima
really believes that Muslims should follow the customs and traditions
that were “legal” in the years between 570 and 632, then the dear
Senator should have been on the floor, bare footed during that
interview. He should not have been sitting in an air-conditioned room,
surrounded by flags. In fact, from today, the Senator should not be
caught in an airplane. He should walk or get on a camel as they did in
those days. He should not go to the hospital when ill (and definitely
not one abroad).

The year is 2010;
we cannot continue to allow people like Yerima have any kind of say in
our society. Such people are not there to move us forward; they are
there to drag us backward.

Religion has
nothing to do with why grown men crave the flesh of young children.
Surely, these are matters of the flesh and not of the spirit? Nobody
buys his religious explanations. That ship has long sailed. We are all
too intelligent to be taken for that repetitive ride. If he has no
other explanation, other than that of following the traditions of
bygone societies, then I will have no choice but to conclude that he is
a paedophile.

Have
you ever had the opportunity to listen to little children, especially
those who live with their parents in the cities, perform folktales? If
you have, then you could not have missed their wonderful innovations in
the retelling of the tales: the reinvention of the characters, the
contemporaneous nature of the plot, the modernity of the entire
rhetoric. I watched my children perform tortoise tales recently and was
thrilled to find that the tortoise in their tales was no longer the
tortoise I used to know.

The tortoise of my
children’s tales wears jeans and a baseball cap, eats hamburgers at Mr.
Biggs, drives a Hummer Jeep, flies airplanes, and plays hip-hop! New
tortoise is a hi-tech crawler that also flies! Old tortoise once tried
to fly and borrowed feathers from birds to actualise that dream. But
greed overtook him in the skies when he attended a party in the company
of birds. Having adopted the name “Unu niile” (All of You), he wanted
to consume alone everything that was presented at the party, with the
argument that the hosts said the things were for “Unu niile.” The birds
in anger took back their feathers and tortoise had to make a risky fall
back to the earth, ending up with a shattered shell. It took the ant
and the snail that, again, were cheated by tortoise in the payment of
fees, to bring the broken pieces of the shell back together.

New hi-tech
Tortoise, on the contrary, has learned to fly without borrowed wings
and feathers. He needs new myths to act a present-future.

The tortoise in
the folktales I learned in my village would find this new tortoise made
and animated in the city too ambitious. The tortoise of my old cultural
imagination had to walk awkwardly in his shell, made of fragments
pieced together, following from the myth of the Great Fall of Tortoise
from the sky, that explains the form of the trickster’s shell.

However, one still
cannot help admiring the sense of temporal appropriateness in the
children’s performance. They obviously find the temporal and spatial
settings of my own version so very distant. They cannot reconcile the
idea of a tortoise with a shell going to marry a beautiful lady – the
king’s daughter! Why, he has to be truly human to be able to do that!
And he has to be awfully rich too! The tortoise of the moment has to be
well read, has to be computer-literate, and has to have access to the
Internet. He has to be a 419er! OK, let’s say he’s occasionally on the
run when the police go after him, sometimes making it to Dubai,
sometimes to Switzerland, but we hope he has a trick up his sleeves,
otherwise he has messed up the story! The new theory of child-performed
folktales requires that storytellers make and tell their own stories.
Don’t tell someone else’s stories. If you do that, you are not a good
storyteller but a “kopi-kata” (from “copycat”). Also, it is wrong in
this tradition to condemn or correct another person’s story. The story
is theirs, not yours. An owner of a story is the owner of the story. As
in Second Life creations and computer games, storytellers have the
freedom to create the type of characters they want and give such
characters the behaviour and values they prefer. So, Tortoise in the
New Theory of child performance becomes more unstable as a signifier,
more unpredictable (except maybe in the trait of being a trickster),
and adaptable to changing circumstances.

These children
demonstrate great courage in altering what they have received from
culture. They don’t want to be passive transmitters of cultural
scripts. No, they choose to rewrite culture, to place it in the present.

In the tradition of
the Old Performance in which I had my own training the teller of a
tortoise tale had to mimic animal talk to create a realistic picture of
the inner setting of the story. Tortoise had to speak Igbo as if he had
a piece of kola nut in his mouth. He had to talk animal, act animal, be
animal in the real sense. The grist of the performance was a
literalisation of the animal character, even if the animal had been
personified. This literalization also extended to the assumption that
such animal characters belonged only to the inaccessible past of the
Igbo culture, not to the present, and also not to the culture of other
ethnic or racial communities. Thus the question of the old tortoise
being presented as speaking English was considered unrealistic.
Tortoise, in the tradition of the New Performance, has learned not just
English, but also the big boy slang of the city. New tortoise is a
happening guy.

Today’s tortoise
could be a politician, a pastor, an Area Boy, a police officer, a
professor, even a journalist. Children as performers are doing things
with tortoise and other animals in our animal farm. Indeed, old things
have become new in the life of child oral performer.

You know those “small boys” who don’t know their mom’s age-mate?
The kind that would come up boldly to you in his saggy jeans, T-shirt and I-pod
and say “what’s up?’ like he cannot see from the more mature crowd around you
in their sedate clothing, that the difference in your ages would make for a
good algebra question? Your friends call them chewing-gum boys or when it is
serious, chewing-gum boyfriends.

Chewing-gum boyfriend (CGB) is different from sugar-boy o!
Sugar-boy is almost equivalent to gigolo except that a gigolo is more
equivalent to male prostitute and highly equivalent to high-class aristo chick/prostitute.
A gigolo could also be your age-mate, younger or older than you. (Sugar boy na
small pikin wey dey date him mama and the mama feeds him.)

A CGB, on the other hand, is that guy who wants to date you even
though you are so obviously out of his league financially and intellectually.
Based on achievements alone, he is a baby compared to you. Then again, he is so
much younger than you that you could be his mom. Anyone can see that he was
learning to make sentences with two-letter words while you were posing proudly
for your matriculation picture. Even now, he is wondering about the best place
to go for his industrial attachment while you are working this correct
nine-to-five job.

And this is after earning your Master’sdegree.

He is what you and your friends call “sweet and mature for his
age” and you are flattered that he would even give you such attention. But he
is serious. He hates girls his age or younger. He prefers a “real woman”.

Still, even as he gives you your respect he wants his own respect.
He wants to be the man in your relationship. Age is nothing but a number, he
tells you. He has set certain standards for himself and if you give him time he
will get there.

He will not collect your money (not like you would be foolish
enough to give him) instead he buys things for you- more expensive stuff than
an average boyfriend would ever have given you. You wonder where he gets his
dough. Well, CGB has turned hustler just because he wants to take care of his
“mature babe”.

He sees himself as more serious minded than his peers. And for
the mere fact that he can afford to date you, he gets serious respect from
them, which is something he is proud of.

You are tempted to fall for CGB because while you were getting
that degree and earning those big bucks you forgot to also invest in a
relationship. Now all the guys your age are hooked up and older guys want much
younger and fresher girls- the ones with pointy breasts that look almost like
virgins.

Age is nothing but a number, CGB keeps drumming into your ears
but by the time he is through with school, gets a job and is ready to settle
down your child bearing days would be over. And you want kids, abi?

Then, there is the issue with your friends- those well-balanced
“wise” friends of yours, who can’t help thinking that out of desperation, you
are considering getting serious with a man-child when a man is really what you
need.

Chewing-gum boyfriend is a derogatory and condescending term that
was coined by not so enlightened people like your friends. It is their way of
describing the most expensive gift an “overly ambitious boy like that” would
ever be able to woo his woman-love with.

So, in trying to figure out this dilemma you suddenly find
yourself in, ask yourself these questions: By what standards is a man judged a
man? Is it by his gender, his achievements, or his age? Is it by what he can
afford to buy a woman? And speaking of age, does it tally with the maturity of
his mind?

Finally, ask yourself this most important of all questions: What
really do you want from your man- love or his birth certificate?

This is not a time many Nigerian workers are happy
about because things have become tough and critical. Most of them go
months on end without pay while bills continue to mount. At the other
end of the spectrum they see politicians glowing and moving about in
new convoys of cars, their wives and children shop and school abroad
while they at home can hardly pay their wards’ school fees or feed
them. In the midst of this gloom confronting the Nigerian worker is the
news that members of the National Assembly are seeking to inflate their
allowances.

According to reports, the members of the National
Assembly numbering 360 currently go home every quarter with a whopping
sum of N27.2 million. That has proved inadequate for the honourable
members. They now want to up it to N42 million each. This is
preposterous in a country where the national minimum wage is N7,500 and
the request by the Nigeria Labour Congress for N50,000 is still pending.

What justifies this raise that the assembly
members are demanding? Perhaps it is to oil the machine for the coming
elections. This much is denoted from the text messages which senators
are said to be passing each other. The text reads:

“My Distinguished, each member in the House of
Representatives has improved earnings from N25m to N43m. This is an
improvement of 40 per cent. Reps members are also getting one Prado
4by4. This is election year; we should rise up and demand from
leadership what is due us. Our entitlement in the budget is nothing
less than N100m per Senator.” The tone of the text is a demonstration
of the fact that politics in this part of the world is all about bread
and butter.

When last did the members of the National Assembly
discuss or table any motion that has to do with the well being of
citizens? This is a dangerous trend. The economy has been in a tailspin
and things are getting tougher for the populace who have continued to
wonder whether this democracy or the variety we have now is what they
bargained for.

The concern of the populace is shared by the
Revenue Mobilisation, Allocation and Fiscal Commission (RMAFC), which
in a recent report said state governments might not be able to pay
workers’ salaries in the next few months if the $3.2 billion left in
the Excess Crude Account is shared. The report states only Lagos State
out of the 36 states of the federation can generate enough to pay its
workers. This is frightening and does not show any cause for cheer at a
time when the world economy is down and many countries are thinking of
shifting attention from oil due to its environmental problems.

We must begin to think creatively about how to
fund our democracy; we have depended too much on short-term measures,
which do not offer long-term solutions.

Several times arguments have been made about the
need to make political office less attractive than it is at the moment.
It is because of the out-of-the-world benefits that politics in this
part of the world confers and the attendant path to stupendous wealth
it offers that people approach it with a do-or-die attitude.

In the light of what the National Assembly
members are proposing for themselves and the reality on the ground as
made public by RMAFC, the time to drum some sense into the political
arena is now.

We cannot afford this profligate politics.

One of the major challenges
confronting us as a people today is the “copy-cat syndrome” which in pidgin
parlance is referred to as “kopi kopi”. It is about our knack for imitating
foreign styles and mannerisms that fail to gel with our unique socio-cultural
makeup.

Despite being aware of this, most of
us still go on pretending about it. Laik say notin de hapun. Time without
number, I had reason to ponder over the mannerisms of supposed “trained”
receptionists and telephone operators who in replying visitors either in person
or via the phone, would say “how may I help you? “- a new way of receiving guests
since the advent of GSM. In the old days, it was “Can I help you?”

My grouse actually is with the
oyi-boik manner in which they speak. Receptionists have had to repeat
themselves with attendant man-hour losses. Situations like these have resulted
in quarrels with pipul wey no get taim fo nonsense. Why not just say “abeg, e
get wetin ah fit du fo yu?” Meaning, “please, can I be of help to you?” Pilots and
crewmembers sometimes spoil the day for passengers in their “spree spree spree” (blabbing) because they hardly communicate.

Passengers have to strain to make
out what they are saying about flight time and general safety tips. After
delaying our flight departure time from 3.20 to 8.30pm, the annoyance of
passengers was set to blow. It was an Abuja – Sokoto flight by one of these new
generation airlines. As preparation for landing at Sultan Abubakar III
International Airport, Sokoto began a member of the cabin crew started
announcing in “spree spree spree” which stoked the anger even more.

You could hear loud hisses and comments like, “abeg mek una drop os”, “wich kain tin bi dis?” “Dis won na big nonsens”. And
there was no apology whatsoever to passengers. To my mind, and just like the
earlier scenario painted in the case of the receptionists, a smart cabin crew
would have doused the tension on board dat aftanun to nait flait by saying, “wi de beg una wel wel. Wi don fol awa han. Wi no go du so egen lai lai. Mek una
fogiv os”.

Translation: We seriously plead for forgiveness. We are clearly at fault. We have
disappointed you all. We will never do so again. Please, forgive us.

In
situations like that, only the use of the language of the people would help. No
bi big big grama wey pesin no go hia wel. Don’t tell that us there may be other
nationalities on board the flight. Oyibo na awa languej? How about pilots
learning Naija Pidgin?

Nigeria’s No.1 rap artist, RUGGEDMAN
once accused his fellow musician Idris Abdulkareem of “kopi kopi” meaning that
his work was “not original”. The accusation led to a thaw in their
relationship. However, they later made up and even did a musical “kolabo” as a
proof of their peaceful reconciliation and resolve to move the music industry
forward.

Previously in this column, I
recounted how a Nigerian broadcaster lost the golden opportunity of working
with the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) because, at the interview
session, he was said to have indulged in “tok tok fo noz” like “spree spree
spree”, “kopi kopi” and all that jazz. He was imitating the oyibos, trying to
be more British than the British. He lost the job. Of kos na!

If you have seen Hamisu Rogo
reporting on NTA, you can differentiate between genuine reporting and kopi kopi
reporting; he is a true Nigerian. No kopi kopi! At the National Assembly, one
Hon Alias “Igodomigodo” from Edo State does a lot of kopi kopi that reminds one
of the late Sam Mbakwe of “timba & kaliba” fame.

Whether he is actually helping his
people get the dividends of democracy by his verbosity or effectively
communicating with his colleagues in the hallowed chambers is none of my
business. Mai oun bi se, dis kain tok tok wit big big grama no dey fo maket
egen. (e no de ren).

After taking a second look at the “copy cat syndrome”, it needs to be repeatedly said that, in these times of
re-branding, kopi kopi de fol awa han. It is doing a lot of damage to our true
identity as a nation, as Nigerians in all ramifications. A re-orientation is
urgently required. Hau pesin go jos de tok wit noz. Blo oyibo we no get hed, no
get tel. Haba!

In less than two months, China has seen six cases of men
charging into schools and kindergartens to kill and hurt children. On April 28,
29 and 30, there was one incident per day in three separate cities. Last
Wednesday, a man with a cleaver killed seven children and two adults in a
central China kindergarten, while on Saturday the man behind the April 29
attack was sentenced to death for stabbing 29 children in an eastern province.
The situation has become not only very dark but very surreal.

News like this spurs social criticism and debate on the faults
of modern society. But what these child killers stirred up was a backlash
against freedom of the press in China. An angry article on an official
government website blamed sensationalist reporting for the copycat killing
spree in small Chinese cities. After the article came demands by the public for
the press to be banned from reporting on any further incidents.

Amid all the hurt and confusion, there was, for a couple of
weeks, a public push to further regulate the media in China. I was a bit taken
aback by the whole debate. It made me wonder seriously whether this country is
ready for democracy. Maybe we have been told what to think for so long, we have
lost our common sense. Take this debate on media responsibility. The public has
confused two completely separate issues: freedom of the press and media control
during a criminal investigation. Talk about shooting the messenger!

But it doesn’t surprise me. So often, conversations in China
become warped. And our society in general is prone to vengeful violence. The
fact that the killers used hammers and other blunt objects to commit these
crimes shows that they are not hard-core criminals who have access to serious
weapons. It means that otherwise, these very disturbed people could have looked
quite normal walking down the street. Thank goodness guns are illegal in this
country. Getting even seems to be very important to the Chinese. Forgiveness is
definitely not in vogue. It’s scary sometimes.

Fortunately, several Chinese magazines have finally started to
do in-depth reporting on the child killings and have tried to diagnose the
social maladies that might have caused such crazy behavior. The articles note
that none of the killers wanted to get away with murder – they all attempted to
commit suicide. And some other reasonable theories have begun to surface.
Caijing, a leading financial magazine, speculated that Chinese frustration with
the lack of an independent justice system, wrongs that are not righted and the
little guy who cannot be heard have led to desperate acts like this.

To kill children in a country with a one-child policy is a knife
aimed at everyone’s heart. Caijing noted that when the weak prey on the weaker,
it is the most desperate kind of cry for public attention. Unfortunately, I
don’t think the public has heard this message.

Southern Weekend, a popular weekly, ran a story with the headline
“Now That He Is Executed, We Are All Relieved,” on the day the first murderer
was executed: An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. Yet no one has lit a
candle for all the dead children. Sympathy is a scarce commodity in this
country unless it is a natural disaster. These kinds of incidents are dealt
with and quickly forgotten, because they are embarrassing to the country.

So I was relieved when Prime Minister Wen Jiabao said in an
interview with Phoenix TV in Hong Kong that the child murders reflect deep
social problems in China. Thank goodness the prime minister actually recognizes
that fact – and didn’t blame the killings on freedom of the press.

(Huang Hung is a columnist
for China Daily, the English-language newspaper in China. She is also an avid
blogger with more than 100 million page views on her blog on sina.co

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