Jigawa's religious Hisbah Board says it has annulled 312 forced marriages over the last four years

JIGAWA State's religious Hisbah Board has revealed that it has annulled 312 marriages over the last four years because they either involved minors and under-aged girls or were forced whereby young females were married off against their wish.

Highly controversial because of the forceful nature with which it implements religious laws, the Hisbah Board, also referred to as the Sharia police, is a major feature in Nigeria's 12 states that practice Sharia law. It is they who arrest and prosecute offenders and also clampdown on practices seen to be un-Islamic like the running of brothels and the sale of alcohol.

However, the Jigawa Hisbah Board claims it has also been doing a lot of good too, pointing out that apart from annulling under-age marriages, it has also successfully reunited 25 street children, known as almajiris, with their parents.

Alhaji Ibrahim Dahiru, the head of the board, said his organisation discovered that the parents of the street children were capable of taking care of them but chose to allow them to roam the streets, begging for food and alms. He added that both the underage marriages were annulled and the street children were united with their parents amicably without any recourse to a court.

“In any reported case of forced marriage, the board do invite the parents/guardians of the victim because the children are underage, thus cannot comprehend the message. We parley with both the parents and the victims of the child marriage, we preach to them and inform them about the right of the girl child, as well as the right of parents on their children.

"We reconcile them. We succeeded by preventing the parent from conducting the forced marriage and urged the parents to take them to school,” he added.

According to a United Nations survey, 43% of Nigerian girls are married before they are 18, with the problem of particularly endemic across northeast and northwest Nigeria. Jigawa State has one of the highest prevalence of child marriages in the country.

Under the Child Rights Act 2003, the minimum legal age of marriage is 18 years. However, as of May 2017 there were still 12 Nigerian states yet to include the Child’s Rights Act in their internal legislation.

Jigawa State domesticated the Child Rights Act in 2012 but later repealed the law that same year. Hon Ahmad Garba, the deputy speaker of the Jigawa State House of Assembly, said that the law was repealed because it did not follow due process before it was enacted.