Wait Father, Let This Girl Be Prepared

Abubakar Sulaiman Muhd

It is something we all witness in our remote and immediate relation or in other families in our society. It is disturbing and could affect one’s health if they fervently concern themselves with the disheartening situation at all times, seeing people who are actually involved, willfully abdicating their responsibility to arrest the problem considering the pathetic condition it brings on the weak and vulnerable members of our society.

If it is not my biological sister today, it would be a girl in the next door neighbor and perhaps your sibling, right inside your home, if you’re a resident of this community. It’s pervasive in our society women quitting school for marriage. Unfortunately, if the marriage is tied without due diligence and thorough investigation, the man might turn out later to be a wrong husband. For some circumstances, largely inadequate or lack of preparation - physical and psychological, the union would soon end in separation few months after the marriage. By that time the girl might have been conceived and is expecting a baby in no time. She would come back to live with her family; judgmental eyes and gossiping words would be going round, reaching men’ ears, hoping one of them would show interest in her. After another ill-advised move for second trial, because she is seen as burden to her family, another marriage would hastily be solemnized. She is divorced again. She is already bored with tedious family life, the heavy pressure coming from the society; she would become eager to be in her own home and be forced to accept a man, any man who asks her marriage.  Like the previous experiences, her man would send her out, the third marriage fails. She would try another husband, on and on it goes throughout her life.    

Effort to educate her parents about the consequence of sending her out this disgraceful way will always end in vain. Parents always never seem to understand the grave implication they cause, acting like they are getting rid of a burden, and or auctioning her out like a tomato seller offering vegetables at a low price when the closing hour begins drawing in and marketsgoers start dispersing.

One is always assailed by  a nagging and disturbing question on how society perceives marriage. A temporary life with her husband, having sex experience for a little while, show the society you’re once married and then get divorced few moons after to return to her parents.

“Let’s her go so that we won’t be the butt of joke and gossip subject of the society,” parents always think. 

The fear for the small talk that would follow won’t allow parents to let the girl be well-equipped and well-prepared so that she could face the challenges ahead – capable of handling nasty situations that might arise in the future from unforeseen circumstances. Divorce, God forbid, not because it will never happen the couple being educated. It is because we hate it. Like Death.

The source of my anger and frustration that’s damaging my health besides the daunting task of explaining to the parents the situation they’re putting in the girl, which as usual they seem never to understand, is not the divorce per se or the subjugation she has been receiving from the husbands.

You can feel the thud-thud of my heartbeat, thundering rapidly and having difficulty sleeping whenever I try to explain to a girl that her life has worth and meaning beyond marriage and she fails to understand. Life having worth outside marriage? I must be crazy, she would think. And then I realize she is already in condition of:

Losing her self-esteem, running from bed to bed to display her deepest secret to several men, the core seat of her feminity.

That her life is now neither here nor there, residing in limbo and dancing on the brink of destruction.     

I am not condemning marriage institution because marriage in itself is not a problem. But it’s actually gnawing up a caring heart the way some people are manipulating marriage as an effective tool of committing injustices against women.  Granted, some parents are well-meaning regarding their intent to choose the best for their daughter, working to prevent a gift coming to the family before her marriage. While they are at it, the good intention of raising their children to be morally sound, they often choose to ignore what boys are doing and seem to forget that the punishment is the same in the sight of Allah. The society believes males are not going to be seriously affected by their illegal sexual activities like females. The society feels that the harm will be graver on females and therefore should be saved before getting involved into activities that would bind them to bitter consequences. They might also be unconsciously working in the hand of some opportunistic elements who are lurking around silently and ready to take advantage of an aspiring, but helpless, young lady to disallow the continuity of her education immediately after the marriage.

I always struggle with the thought of how people understand the injunction spelt out in our religion that says “dalabal ilmu farithatun ala kullu Muslim wal Muslimati:  knowledge is as compulsory to women as onto men”. Considering this prescription, my thinking is that knowledge should come first before marriage.

It’s my opinion to assert that a mind filled with goal, intellectual drive and aspiration is not a space where sexual thoughts would dwell and thrive, unless you have a base mind. I can see that now you begin to ask what if she has a great sexual drive or is inherently bad? In such case, this isn’t exclusive to school girls alone. The society is poisoned and decided to be unjust against female right from the beginning since there are already  negative stereotypes and preconceived notions attached to college girls as prime suspect of premarital intercourse.

Some women are also not helping matter when they are in high institutions of learning to engage in behaviors that society believes deviate from the conventional norms.  Convinced they have their freedom, they tend to be ruthless in getting back at the society. Seeing this, the patriarchy is provoked to punctuate her excess. And what next? - she got married.

But anyway, marriage is not a problem even though I can understand that some people inclined to see it as such, a conclusion wrongly drawn. I can only see it as an impediment in cases where the girl is never to continue her studies on account of marriage. We should not overlook the financial and logistic difficulties that parents and husbands struggle with.

Education doesn’t coexist with oppression, injustices, disease and poverty. It is apt to say arming a girl with education is a weapon to protect her from wickedness and lack of it creates rooms for the girl to be easy prey in the hand of a wicked husband. However, some parents are stubborn and helplessly rigid in their stand, which sometimes brings about another unhelpful situation. If a lady desires to get married while doing her studies, her parents should have to listen to her in order to avoid falling into unnecessary trouble. Care must be taken by the parents to ensure the prospective candidate is a man that would respect the girls’ right to education to honor her wishes and aspirations.

If her husband wakes up to the other side of the bed after having a good night to allow her to continue her studies, it serves as an advantage to her as a college married woman. This will prevent bad guys from making amorous advances courtesy of her status and commands revered esteem and nice treatment from her male colleague sympathizers. She may realize that someone pities her and is doing her a favor. Better to remain independent, proud and dignified.

I observe that not all people in the society do view women education as a problem and possible threat to the men’ position as commander-in-chief in their little republic where she is always expected to serve as a ceremonial head. The society is very skeptical and suspicious of anything they suspect to be an agenda of imperial mission and even worst, introduced with haughty arrogance. Otherwise, the culture of allowing every single woman to peruse higher education would have gained massive acceptance, as it appears to be an old injunction in our religion.

I doubt if there are people who hold negative view on ‘this education’ other than the acquisition method and its frequent wrong application, in which case such negativities can be found in any other education system. People have realized too well, by everyday experiences, that the benefit of ‘this education’ outweighs its disadvantages, with opportunities or otherwise coming to individuals according to their educational status: ignorance vs knowledge, college diploma vs degree and high degree.

Why people choose to remain deliberate obtuse if you ask me is in order to frustrate imperialist attempt at downgrading them where other people from other shores believe that they are introducing civilization - with blatant air of arrogance - for the first time to a people who already have culture and civilization spanning centuries and ages. The society is very, very determined to reject anything presented to them this way and which  they consider to be a clandestine mission, set to gradually destabilize and erode their traditional values and belief system.

This is why it always feels awkward and uncomfortable to me to categorize a sort of knowledge and call it as only ‘formal’ or simply term it ‘Western’ education. What becomes of those great architects who built a grand kano moat and those who excelled in Ajami literacy and calligraphy, trade, governance and diplomacy thousand years before the coming of Whiteman and the accomplishments of those great artists and heritages are still cherished and practiced in our contemporary societies? The impression is that their achievements are not formal and therefore should not be given status of formal recognition. This line of thinking is denying vast bodies of knowledge from across cultures and civilizations around the world its origin and existence, and even when recognized it’s often with denigration. If we go on this subservient way, everything is surrendered to a certain people when epistemistically appropriated as possession of a particular culture.

With the smug feeling of weaning people from barbarism and backwardness, you may notice that you are denigrating a sort of established culture. They would rather hold their stand than make concession even when it appears they are wrong. People aren’t actually rejecting knowledge, but the overbearing manner of its introduction.        

So if forces in the argument would come, with genuine intention and not in lethal determination and antagonism, to sit down and pragmatically approach the issue, the situation would not have been such worst and the difficulty confounded. The society will be the winner anyway. But it always seems each force in both side of the argument is determined and never willing to reach agreement.

Everyone is welcome to their views. Common sense has broad applications and if an idea is often yielding a bad result, it won’t hurt if the allegiance to the rule would be reconsidered.

The prayer is for the parents to be a little patient for a relatively short time so that the girl would complete her studies before getting married. It just looks like delaying something that will necessarily come. With education, there is likelihood that she can meet a partner with similar accomplishments and goals to have a lasting marriage. Things are not always easy for a married woman - juggling household chores with school assignments or a woman in college who was once married – bearing a lot of stigma and burden struggling to continue her studies.  

PS

There are also parents who never bear close investigation. They do not accept corrections and are quick to shut down any discussion that challenges their views. They hold extreme views and would threaten to curse their kids to a point one feels like she is committing a sin correcting her parents even when they go wrong.

The impression is like parents are above the humanly nature of making mistakes. They are very authoritative, giving the impression they own the kids and should decide their future without having the firsthand experience of the kids’ reality and experiencing their mental universe.  Convinced that they know more than the kid, they dismiss anything she says outright since she is still a little babe in arms. They don’t accept that their own kid could grow up to be ahead of them in thought and ideas. But our society believes a child can be richer than their parents. Where do we go wrong?…

You cannot be hostile to CHANGE and succeed. You cannot avoid change because the only thing that is not changing is change. Up and coming generations have understood this thing of modernity and are no longer thinking in the binary way of their ancestors, where the result is either 1 or 0. Be prepared, accept the change and alter the currents of the age to suits your needs or you fade away. 

(@abubakarsulai13)

Fresh Dawn, Difficult Morning

By Abubakar Sulaiman Muhd

Swearing in of President Buhari

Buhari came in during a tough time -  a situation that looks “like building Rome in one day without a Kobo.”  He is in position not many would love to be in their life, not even his sons and daughters if they are like the children of other greed politicians who enjoy living from the suffering of downtrodden.

The expectations are high despite the dwindling of oil price, armed struggle, massive theft of foreign reserve and mounting national debt. But such expectations could not be compromised because the masses whom Buhari climbed their shoulders to the post “have no water, no food, no road, no good education, no security, no light, no fuel and no nothing.” Said Pius Adesanmi, a key backer and campaigner at the intellectual core of Buharism. They are people left with only hope and trust in Buhari regime. 

He is expected to deliver those expectations. People believe in his integrity. He has had certain principles that prevent him, in his mind, from becoming like every other politicians. Numerous efforts had been made to drag him into the gutter to abandon his cause in exchange for lucrative offer. His dogma to remain with masses earned him the honorific epithet of “Mai Gaskiya” – the Hausa version of ‘trusted’ which distinguished  him as the  beacon of hope and champion of the underdogs.

He stood for the office for 12 years, fighting for the masses every election season since 2003. Frustrated, he publically shed tears in 2011 after election defeat to announce his intention to not vie for the office of the president anymore. After rigorous persuasion and lobbying, he reluctantly answered the call to contest again, which certainly if defeated yet again, would mark the end of his political career.

Buhari is not poor, he’s only a rich man with relative ascetism.  For what, and to whom is he doing all this? Buhari sees Nigeria as a family firm, an afflicting business  he could not watch continue suffer and felt duty-bound to rescue. He delved into the struggle for the young generation to wrench back hopes and save the nation’s throat from the vicious grip of the greedy leaders so that upon growing up the young men and women would not find their future entirely destroyed or mortgaged to the IMF. “Don’t collect any loan again,” the citizens cried, “it isn’t working here. It will only push us deeper and deeper into economic despair.

In Nigeria, the finance ministers and former and serving Central Bank Governors are people who read Economics mainly for private values, accepting exploitative conditionalities and doing all it takes to keep the economy going in line with the IMF directives. “I wish Buhari economic team would comprise of people who have idea about the terrible condition of our people,” working to benefit all and not entirely for the advancement of IMF policies which create anger and hardship on people who are already poor and rewarding those with awards as hero who help ensure the execution of the deals while our people are dying.    

There is one critical issue that needs to be addressed. Early in 2012 Nigerians took to the streets rioting in protest against government decision to end fuel subsidy. They insisted the price should remain cheap at the pump whether the subsidy existed or not. People are caught in dilemma, knowing the fuel subsidy is fraud, a business rife with tax evasion, patronage and corruption, which raised public suspicion if the subsidy has actually existed. It was elite fraud where friends of politicians are paid inflated figure for bringing little or nothing at all to report the kickback to the people high in government.  But believing they, and not the politicians, not the power structure, would be the biggest victims if the subsidy was to be eliminated, they fought for the subsidy to continue despite the fact they needed a competitive economy.   

But the notion that subsidy could not be good idea in creating healthy and competitive economy is nonsense from the ordinary citizens’ perspective  who couldn’t even have to listen to the economist’s bullshits that ignores the worsening state of people’s atrocious living condition.

“Then what’s the use of the state,” people asked, “henceforth, if healthcare, fuel, education, water and energy would not be provided at subsidized price.  Then the government ceases to be useful to ordinary citizens because these are the only ways the poor can benefits from the wealth of the motherland?”

We criticized Jonathan for his decision to end fuel subsidy, vociferous and outspoken, speaking scathingly anyhow in TV and public debates because we were not politicians and the politicians were in opposition, employing angry pens to write and draw repugnant caricature of the president and his cabinet, depicting a dog wearing a bowler hat for the president and a bitch with glass in her face describing the coordinating minister of economy.

And now there is a big question hanging perilously on the air:  what if Buhari administration seeks to end subsidy on petroleum resources - isn’t it hypocritical of us to defend the same policy we vehemently attacked as if we were fighting for our life?

Buhari does not believe fuel subsidy has even existed. If he is going to cancel the subsidy on petroleum resources in order to stop leakages to make the economy more vibrant, radical overhaul should be put in place to cleanse the sector of its corrupt practices. National refineries should be revived so that citizens can buy fuel at a cheap price for there is no way one will consume fuel from foreign refineries and expect the price to be low without government doling out subsidy.

What Jonathan administration would never do was starting the austerity measures from descending and not ascending order, a selfish move to oppress the poor by eliminating jobs and raising heavy tax on the ordinary citizens, slashing pensions and wages while the terrible reality revealing itself as severe hardship on the masses. It should start in descending order from the top leadership in order to avoid humanitarian crisis; cut the sinful executive allowances, cut corruption and the leakage in the economy, weed out the parasites in government to make an effective and sizable workforce so that with every cut, you help the state and those morons in office who blabbed their way through the universities as students so as to be optimally utilized on farmland since they find productivity a rocket science.

Jonathan and his cabinets were not the sort of men that Nigerians would trust since they could not exercise little restraint before descending upon the fuel subsidy trust fund. What they were selling to the masses was stark inhumanity - starving the poor, feeding the rich and having strong armed forces to keep down civil unrest. Under whatever regime, Nigerians can’t accept a deal where the coordinating minister of the economy would loot and then lied to Nigerians, loading it on the masses, emptying the foreign reserve to lead a life of luxury and buying big mansions in Zurich. All this as austerity measure?

Nigerians are ready to bear the brunt of cuts in government spending, with top officials setting examples. As the president identified the horrible condition in his speech, quoting from Julius Caesar, “the tide in the affairs of men is difficult” but not insurmountable that “we could not succumb to hopelessness and defeatism. We can fix our problems.”   

The new regime will concentrate its focus on the project of building new Nigeria. Only that we will continue working to document thieving politicians so that when their children grew up, they would read that their parents are thieves and dullards who only perfected the art of stealing and looting so that they would wish if they were born in another family. Those who’d run should run, the new regime is not going to chase after you. The past is the prologue.