I Do- Nigerian law

It couldn't have been past 6am when I woke up on Saturday morning  to the incessant broadcast messages on blackberry advising and almost threatening me to support the #childnotbride cause that had over taken the nation like a bad case of hay fever... I had heard conversations about this earlier in the week and chucked it down to the joblessness of the members of the house of assembly looking for another sitting allowance, but Saturday's occupy BBM world was just the heights of it... it was a painful reminder that somewhere north of Nigeria, babies will be getting married off to men old enough to be their grand-dads if care is not taken.

The care to be taken it seems required me to change my display pictures on blackberry every 3 hours (which I was refusing to do) to show a child bride with wedding veil been grabbed and dragged to the alter by a potbellied man with a lecherous look on his face and all the other funny pics up for
grabs that day, and also change my display messages to show statements such as 'what she needs is an education not an ejaculation'. and many more creative innuendos your brilliant mind can come up with in the space of 30mins. One of my contacts also went further to threaten me and the rest of her 100 plus contacts that '..if you keep silent now, don't cry when an Eighty Five Year old comes calling for your 9 year old daughter'. I was going to reply and tell them how ludicrous a situation like that would be without parental consent, but I wasn't in the right frame of mind to receive insults that lovely Saturday. At a point I was almost tempted to delete DIVA from my contact list.

Thanks to ASUU strike my free weekend was wrapped up with my cousins visits...twin girls...both of them I took care of when they were in primary school with their homework...now fully grown adults in university. I loved how their eyes lit up when they pounced on the skimpy dresses I had selected from my wardrobe to 'dash' them, it felt good...you know, I could almost feel an invisible pat on my back for impressing these hard to impress 20 year olds.  Then on Sunday afternoon we went out... I think our major aim was to paint Lagos state red from the confines of Lekki and Victoria island, and we had all the satisfaction in the world when we see both male and female heads turn at our arrival and departures from certain spots... we were high on something....probably excitement, probably because we hadn't seen in a while, 2 weeks is a long time for cousins to see I guess.

But it was on the drive home, when they both were chatting in between giggles about their male friends, old and new, that my mind drifted off to the #childnotbride thingy that is rocking everywhere. And I reasoned that if our law makers want to be foolish and make bad decisions in their spare time and on tax payers money, why oh why are they not considering passing a law that makes it punishable by law not to be married by 25-26...like let there be a three (3) YEAR jail term for any lady who isn't married at the age of 25 and any man who isn't married at the age of 28. And after you serve your term, if you still aren't married after six months, you will be sent back as a second offender for an additional one year, instead of this imbecilic girl child marriage they are debating on. I'm sure that if such a law was in place, the only driving I will be doing with my young cousins on a fine Sunday evening will be going to pick up my son from a birthday party where I must have dropped him off earlier on that day with a satisfied look on my face when he screams 'mummmy!!!' Not exchanging 'men are this and that' stories with these youngsters. And the many angry spinsters pinging me and making my phone hang concerning #childnotbride will be 2 or 3 compared to the over 20 spinsters in their mid/late twenties  (who are afraid that all the available men will soon be marrying teenagers instead) pinging me on the matter on my contact list.

Our law makers must be insane...