The Emir of Kano, Alhaji Muhammadu Sanusi II, has expressed his concern about setting the minimum marriage age for girls at 18.
The Child Rights Act sets the age of marriage at 18 years-old, though the Nigerian Constitution is silent about the legal age of marriage.
However, only 23 states adopted the child act while in others minimum age of marriage can be as low as 12 years-old.
The 54-year-old emir of Kano recently wedded 18-year-old Sa’adatu Barkindo-Musdafa(pictured), daughter of the Lamido of Adamawa, Muhammadu Barkindo-Musdafa as his 4th wife.
On Tuesday in Abuja while delivering a speech at a media conference, themed “Strategies to Improve the Protection of Girl Child in Nigeria”, Sanusi reportedly argued for early marriage blaming the current Federal Government’s revenue sharing formula for the rising abuses of the girl child’s rights in Nigeria.
He said, “If you tell a man in the village, ‘don’t marry your child off till the age of 18’, what does she do between the age of 11 and 18?
“We need to understand that the problem begins from the economy and from the management of the resources of the country.
“These are the states that are supposed to provide education and healthcare to hundreds of millions of people. The states are staved of funds.”
Recently the Spanish government announced it was to raise the marriage age from 14 to 16 to bring it into line with the rest of Europe.
Estonia now has the lowest marriage age in Europe with teenagers able to get hitched at 15 with parental approval.
Globally, the average legal age of marriage for boys is 17 and 16 for girls but many countries permit them, particularly girls, to marry much younger.
Several places, including the state of Massachusetts in the United States, allow girls as young as 12 to get married in “exceptional circumstances” with the consent of a judge.
