The Senior Special Assistant (SSA) to President Bola Tinubu on Community Engagement, North Central, Abiodun Essiet, has told the speaker of the Niger State House of Assembly, Abdulmalik Sarkindaji, to shun the idea of marrying off minors and allow them develop as children.
Essiet, whose attention has been drawn to the marriage of 100 orphans, stated this via her X page on Thursday and reiterated that she is not against marriage. She confirmed her stand against the marriage of minors who are still in their stage of development.
“I am not against conducting marriage for orphans above 18 years of age if they give their consent to the marriage, but I am against underaged marriage.
“Let children be children,” she said.
Furthermore, she advised the speaker, who claimed that his children are enrolled in a private school in Minna, to go ahead and marry off his underaged female children and not the orphans.
“The speaker in his interview stated that his children are in the best private schools in Minna while he wants to marry under age orphans of poor people.
“My advice to the speaker is to marry off his underaged girls before conducting the mass marriage of underaged orphans,” she tweeted.
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According to SSA to Community Engagement, she said after her team visited Bobi, Shadadi, and Banji communities in Mariga Local Government of Niger State, where the orphans inhabit, they discovered that the said-to-be married children are “underaged and dropped out of school at JSS 3 and SS 1.”
She added that “the Niger State Imam Forum has vowed to go ahead with the marriage plan on grounds that it does not contravene any sections of the Nigerian constitution or teachings of Islam.
“When senior state officials hide under the cloak of religion or culture to embark on policies and programmes that exploit the economically handicapped, increase poverty, and deepen ignorance, they are only fueling the prevailing inequality and weaponizing poverty in our country.”
Meanwhile, Essiet, in her capacity, disclosed that she had offered to empower these girls, capturing them in federal government programmes and also noting that the speaker and the local government chairman were aware of her plans.
