By Moses E. Ochonu
A quick proclamation by way of
introduction: Ese Oruru, Patience Paul, and their parents are not the villains
of the kidnapping and conversion of underage Christian girls in Northern Nigeria . Blaming the victim is a form of
re-victimization, an exculpatory gimmick employed by those who, for reasons
known only to themselves, do not want to confront or unequivocally condemn an
egregious crime.
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| *Ese Oruru: After her traumatic experience |
More instances of abduction, forced conversion and in some
cases forced marriage of underage Christian girls have now come to light since
the resolution of the Ese Oruru and Patience Paul cases. Ese’s case has opened
a floodgate. Many cold cases, long-stalled in the labyrinth of law enforcement
and legal inaction, are now in the public domain, resurrected by parents as the
press and social media have become sensitized to this menace. As of today,
there is an unresolved case in Zaria , one case
in Zamfara State ,
and four cases in Bauchi
State
There should be no justifying the many wrongs that have been
committed against these children and their parents by overzealous religious
enforcers who have placed themselves above the legal and law enforcement
institutions of the country. Some of these cases, in addition to the crimes of
forceful conversion of and sexual assaults on a minor, are clear cases of
kidnapping, a heinous offense under our penal code. Even in the case of Yunusa
and Ese, clearly a 22 year old (his own father says he is 22) cannot have sexual
relations with a 14 year old under Nigerian law. It is statutory rape of a
child. A 14 year old is not at the age of sexual, romantic, and marital
consent, period; so enough with all the specious mitigations of this egregious
crime. Enough with the defensiveness.
Those of us who lived and schooled in the Muslim-majority states of
the North know that these incidents have been going on for years. They are not
outliers, as some people would want us to believe. Parents and pastors have
been crying about these crimes for decades but very few cases actually made it
to the national press. Starved of national press attention and without the
democratized discursive space of today’s social media, many such cases were
never resolved in favor of the children and their parents.
 |
| *Ese Oruru: Before her abduction and violation |
This is a time for a full accounting. Ese Oruru’s traumatic fate has
opened a window onto a recurring violation of children and parental rights. It
has given us an opportunity to address the underlying problems once and for
all, instead of dealing only with the symptoms of a deep-rooted pathology.
These cases have one thing common: the overarching role of two
entities in enabling these crimes and undermining the protection of children
and the sanctity of the parent-child relationship.
The first villain is the Sharia Commission. These cases have
revealed that these Commissions of unelected people (who are nestled in an
institution with a nebulous remit and an undefined relationship to our legal
and law enforcement institutions) have usurped the powers of the police and the
legal system.
The Sharia Commissions have in each of these cases chosen the sides
of abductors over the protection of the rights of the children and their
parents. In each case the Commissions were too eager to win converts to Islam
(quite contrary to mainstream Islamic consensus on the consenting age of
conversion) to care about the wellbeing of the children, their parents’ rights,
or the fact that adults may have sexually violated the minors.
These cases have revealed that the Sharia Commissions have placed
themselves above both the police and traditional authorities. In both the Kano
The abductors are playing the Sharia Commissions like a pipe musical
instrument. They dare not kidnap underage Muslim girls because they know that
the Commissions would hold them liable for a crime that is clearly against
Islamic law. Even if they did, they would not go the Commission if the parents
cried out; they would not get sympathy or protection there. They target
underage Christian girls and run to the Commission when challenged because they
know that members of these Commissions would give them credit and protection
for bringing people into the Muslim fold, for engaging in Da’wah, even if this
entailed the violation of a child’s right.
But the Sharia Commissions are actively complicit in these crimes;
they are not merely being manipulated into victimizing the girls. In the
Sokoto, Kano
This is a national embarrassment — the fact that an unelected body
of individuals empowered to oversee and arbitrate the religious affairs of
Muslims in a particular state is now more powerful than the Nigerian police and
will not allow the police to do their constitutional job of protecting and
enforcing the rights of Nigerian citizens and helpless minors wherever they
are. This is de facto social federalism of the perverse kind.
This is a moment of truth for the country. Do we want to be a
modern, secular nation, or one where secular state institutions enshrined in
the constitution are subordinated to the whims of parochial institutions
established by states to supervise the interest of one out of Nigeria
Either we have a nation or we don’t. Either we have a police
institution or we don’t. Either we have enforceable laws and rights or we
don’t. Either we have a judiciary capable of adjudicating cases between
people of different religions or we don’t. The role of the Sharia Commissions
is now clearly in conflict with the constitutional role of the police and the
judiciary.
The Sharia Commissions have outgrown their original remit and have
now supplanted law enforcement and the judiciary. Their role must be defined
and the limits of their jurisdictions properly delineated. Their usurpation of
secular police and judicial functions has to be checked.
The other villain in this story is the police. They have not exactly
covered themselves in glory in their responses to these incidents. In all the
cases, the police proved powerless to confront the impunity of the Sharia
Commissions, paralyzed in the face of the belligerent postures of the
Commissions.
The police also seemed, in all the cases, to regard the complaints
of the parents as nuisances. They would not on their own do what they are
empowered by the constitution to do: free abducted children and prosecute the
perpetrators. They would not protect vulnerable children pried away from their
traumatized parents. Even when emirate councils authorized them to reunite the
children with their parents, they inexplicably would not do that, deferring to
the seemingly omnipotent Sharia Commissions.
It is a national shame. If violated children and their parents
cannot rely on the police to secure their freedom then what are the police good
for? In one of the Bauchi cases, the police commissioner himself, who was part
of a negotiation, allowed the girl’s abductors to defy his authority and return
to their home with their captive even as her parents pleaded that their
daughter, who was right there, should be released to them. No arrest, no
rescue.
From what we have read, the traditional institutions did the right
thing in the cases of Ese Oruru and Patience Paul. They reported the matter to
the police and overruled those who wanted to use the ruse of religious
conversion to appeal to the religious emotions of the emirate/sultanate. The
criticism of these institutions is thus undeserved in my opinion.
The police failed the girls and their parents despite the effort of
the traditional institutions to do the right thing. The Sharia Commissions were
complicit in the crimes. Their staff who continued to detain the girls in
defiance of orders issued by the traditional institutions and the police ought
to be prosecuted for enabling kidnap, forceful conversion, and sexual assault.
It is saddening that these serious crimes have been sucked into Nigeria
Their ordeal has opened an avenue to have a constructive
conversation about child rights, about the abuse of girl children, and about
the deployment of religious sentimentality and zealotry to enslave and
victimize children. The same dubious use of religion to oppress children is
rampant in Pentecostal Christian circles, where vulnerable children are
serially accused of witchcraft and are physically abused or cast away to
ostensibly rid community of evil spiritual spells.
It has also been disheartening to see a legitimate complaint about a
widespread problem turned into the familiar bashing of Northern Nigerian Muslim
culture. For the record, the north is not as insular as many Southerners assume
it to be — not in religious terms and not in ethnic and cultural terms. It is a
remarkably diverse region. Many ethnic groups and families in the North have
adherents of both Islam and Christianity.
Contrary to what one might believe, interreligious marriage is
fairly common in the north, although not encouraged. And couples are rarely
harmed for entering into such marriages. In fact some Muslims in the region
marry Christians and allow their wives to continue to attend church as Islam
does not compel husbands to convert their wives. And some Christians marry
Muslims. There is a long history of marital crossing of religious lines in the
north. I have in my possession colonial records from close to a hundred years
ago in which colonial authorities debated what to do about consensual
interreligious marriages in the north.
In many parts of the North, including some areas in the
Muslim-majority states of the Northwest, Christians and Muslims are deeply
comingled as my friend Shobana Shankar’s book, Who Shall Enter
Paradise, shows. This interdependence makes cohabitation and
intermarriage inevitable. It also makes conversion from one religion to the
other fairly common, with few negative repercussions — again contrary to what
many people believe.
In some sense, then, the menace of these kidnap-and-convert
incidents involving underage Christian girls is galling precisely because it is
new and departs radically from the familiar historical patterns of relations
between proximate Muslims and Christians in the region. It must be understood
as an offshoot of the over-politicization of the religious space in Northern Nigeria , a fairly recent phenomenon.
These child abduction and conversion incidents should thus not be
advanced to perpetuate the myth that adherents of the two religions do not
mingle positively or that their relations are only marked by conflict and
crimes of the type committed against the girls.
*Ochonu can be reached at meochonu@gmail.com
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