Senator Sani Yerima

I read in the National Dailies and heard from other sources of information that a former Governor of a state and now a lawmaker of the upper chamber(the Senate of the Federal Republic of Nigeria) is taking a 13 years old girl to be his fourth wife. A 13 year old child to be a wife? That was shocking to me. It was shocking because the man is supposed to be a pace setter, an upright individual, a repository of sound moral values and a maker of good laws that Nigerians can be guided by. If this supposed lawmaker is the one defiling an innocent child, then there is a problem.
Of all the adults, grown up women in the world, Yerima did not see but saw a child just learning to understand the world and even become aware of herself as a person. Why a child? Honourable, why this dishonourable act? Unfortunately their culture allows such offensive, barbaric, primitive and despicable act. But the outcome is always disastrouus for the female child. The child whose reproductive organ is not matured and ready for motherhood tears and perforates during child birth. The child becomes a Vestico Vagina Fistula (VVF) victim. The child does not have control over her organs anymore if this happens as faeces and urine leak uncontrolaably through the perforated organs. The child stinks and automatically becomes an outcast in the community. What a punishment? First the child is defiled, secondly her health, wellbeing is destroyed and thirdly for no reason of hers she is made an outcast because she stinks. What a calamity!.
Why are the enlightened people in the north not campaigning against this? What do they stand to gain by keeping quiet? Who are they protecting? Are they happy seeing innocent girls that are supposed to be in school roaming around or abandoned in hospitals to die?
I feel sorry for all the young girls from the Northern part of Nigeria who are victims of a religious and cultural system that do not recognise them as human being but object to be controlled and used anyhow.
This type of marriage between a child of 10 to 16 and an old man of 40 years should be discouraged and stopped immediately. If religions allow you to marry ten wives, that is your business but please marry a woman whose reproductive organ is well formed. Stop subjecting innocent female children to sexual abuse. It is disgusting, nauseating, vile and revolting.
It is only a sick mind like Yerima that can stoop so low to take advantage of a parents' poverty to abuse their under age girls. I pray he does not subject the girl to a lifetime disease and ridicule.
I sincerely hope Nigeria government will do something urgently to stop this.