Child marriage: Our decision was misinterpreted, misreported & totally taken out of context - Senate

Nearly one week after news brokered that the senate are plotting to sign into law a controversial constitutional provision which allows marriage for underage children, the senate in an official  statement Tuesday, July 23 said its decision last Wednesday was “wildly misinterpreted, misreported and totally taken out of context”.  The deputy senate president, Ike Ekweremadu, who heads the constitution review committee, said:

“We can never support child marriage,” Let Nigerians understand with us that these issues have nothing to do with early marriage or Islam. It is purely about renunciation of citizenship.”

The Senate said Nigerians had largely misread its good intention at attempting to delist a section that has been in the constitution since 1979.

Mr. Ekweremadu said the Senate’s interest in the removing that part of the law was not even informed by what Nigerians are clamouring against in the first place: child marriage. He said the concern was to remove as it did with section 26, subsection 2(a) any aspect of the constitution that mentions woman or girl in a way that appears discriminatory. He said:

“Section 29(4) (a) has already defined “full age” as age 18 and above. We considered it gender discriminatory and imbalance to place the man and woman on different scales in matters of citizenship renunciation,”

As the amendment of the constitution is a continuous process, the Deputy Senate president said, that section will be revisited. A quicker window of a reversal would be if the House of Representatives acts on the same subject and passes it, requesting the Senate to concur.

The House’s voting, billed for Tuesday, was rescheduled for Wednesday due to faulty electronic voting platform.

The child marriage saga ensued last week when ahead of the Senate’s vote to amend the constitution last week, Mr. Ekweremadu’s committee suggested the definition relating to marriage be deleted, and the Senate needed 73 members to approve that proposal.

At first vote, that benchmark was met. But a dramatic reversal soon followed after former governor of Zamfara State, Ahmed Yerima, protested the decision as un-Islamic, prompting a second vote in which the Senate secured only 65 members this time, meaning Mr. Yerima won and the section could not be deleted.