Bayelsa State Government is set to take up, and do everything within the Law to ensure a girl-child is saved from “marriage made in the other world.”
That was purportedly the tie between a four-year-old baby and a 54-year-old man to whom she was married off recently in Bayelsa State.
The ‘marriage’ held on December 26, last year, in Akeddei community, Sagbama council area of Bayelsa, reportedly at the instance of the child’s parents. And belief in reincarnation played a central role in the whole affair.
Some reports cited community sources who said the girl-bride told her parents the 54-year-old man, identified as Elder Akpos, was her husband in their previous life who died mysteriously. She purportedly recounted how, over the years, she had been moving from place to place, to be given birth to by different parents – all in search for her former husband.
A source was quoted saying: “The little bride said if she were not allowed to marry her husband, she would have no other business in the Akeddei community, and that she was going to die peacefully and go her way. To avoid losing the girl to death, the people of Akeddei decided to organise a glamorous wedding ceremony to mark the union of the two previous life lovers.”
A child rights advocacy group in Bayelsa, DO Foundation, was outraged over the purported ‘marriage’ and called for arrest and prosecution all adult persons complicit in the act.
The group condemned child marriage as horrendous, despicable and a criminal activity, saying it violated both the Nigerian Constitution and the Child’s Right Act that Bayelsa State domesticated in 2016, which “criminalises child marriages and child betrothals, prescribing various terms of imprisonment and heavy fines.”
A statement by the group’s chairperson, Elvis Mannie, urged security agencies to thoroughly investigate the act with a view to protect the child from sexual exploitation.
The Bayelsa government was subsequently reported to have summoned all parties involved for interrogation aimed at salvaging the girl-bride.
But there is indeed more than criminal intent to be interrogated in this mater, in Hardball’s view. There are psychiatric and psychoanalytic dimensions as well.
For instance, how precocious could a four-year-old get to cognitively identify a person she purportedly claimed to be her husband in another world, and how intelligibly did she communicate that identification to convince adults including her parents?
And was she the one who convinced the 54-year-old ‘husband’ of the connection, or did he for his part also entered into the supernatural realm of identification? Visuals from the ‘wedding’ showed the girl-bride being lapped by an adult, perhaps the mother. So, how and when did the ‘husband’ hope to consummate the union?
Even the ‘bride’s’ parents operated on less than sane cognitive level. There’s need for all involved in the act to have their heads checked to ascertain their sanity.
