Having weathered the storm over his controversial marriage to an 18 year old princess, Emir of Kano – Muhammadu Sanusi II was a headline speaker at a “Strategies to Improve the Protection of Girl Child in Nigeria”
conference in Abuja this week. The key areas the conference focused on
included early marriage, violence against girls and kidnapping.
18 Year Old HRH Emirette of Kano Sa’adatu Barkindo Sanusi
During
his speech, Sanusi suggested that the answers to the issues such as
early marriage may not be as easy as simply setting 18 as the minimum
age for marriage.
According to Channels TV,
The monarch, who was also against setting 18 years as minimum age for marriage, said the first step to addressing the issue was to address the root causes of poverty in the communities.
“If you tell a man in the village, ‘don’t marry your child off till the age of 18’, what does she do between the age of 11 and 18?
Instead he criticised the current Federal Government’s Revenue Sharing Formula
“We need to understand that the problem begins from the economy and from the management of the resources of the country. He condemned a system where the states get the residual of the nation’s revenue after the Federal Government had taken a large portion of it.
“These are the states that are supposed to provide education and healthcare to hundreds of millions of people. The states are staved of funds,” the Emir said.
The Nigerian
Constitution does not establish a minimum age of marriage. The Child
Rights Act, which was passed in 2003, sets the age of marriage at 18
years-old. According to the Child Not Bride organization, only 23 of
Nigeria’s 36 states have adopted this act. As a result, in some areas of
the country the minimum age of marriage can be as low as 12 years-old.
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