File image of Kano government’s mass wedding for 1,500 brides. Photo: AFP
Kano’s recent announcement that it spent N1.5bn to bankroll mass weddings should prompt national alarm rather than applause. Kano State remains rampant in the worrying roster of northern states – including Kaduna, Sokoto, Zamfara, Katsina and Borno – that have for years organised and financed large-scale nuptial ceremonies. Authorities offer three common rationales: to reduce social vices by settling young people, to uphold cultural or religious norms, and to show benevolence or win political goodwill. All three are poor covers for a policy that is at best wasteful and at worst dangerous.
The states most active in sponsoring mass weddings are also among Nigeria’s most populous and poorest, repeatedly identified so in household surveys and poverty indices. They harbour vast numbers of almajirai and out-of-school children, and large cohorts of unemployed youth. In that context, using public funds to marry off young adults who lack financial independence or emotional readiness is a perverse misallocation of scarce resources. It amounts to a form of conscription of the poor – a deliberate pushing of the state’s most vulnerable into responsibilities they cannot sustain. This practice is a weaponisation of population. Products of such marriages are invariably trapped in an archaic cultural crucible due to lack of credible education. They often end up as street children and fall easy prey for recruiters of armed groups, bandits and private political militias. Millions of neglected children from these families are not raised in stable homes. They become feeder teams for violence.
The social menace does not respect regional boundaries. Increasingly, idle illiterate young men from the North are moved in food and cement trucks southwards in search of better life, and in some instances contribute to crimes and community tensions far from their places of origin. Instead of staging photo op mass weddings, Northern state governments should spend on durable solutions: vocational training, seed funding for micro startups, expanded access to quality basic and technical education, and meaningful apprenticeship programmes for poor and unemployed youth. Investing in human capacity development will yield sustainable marriages grounded in economic security and psychological maturity. It will undercut the recruitment base of violent actors.
Mass weddings as a government policy symbolise poor governance that perpetuates the North’s under-development. They turn generosity into ceremonial spectacle, while failing to address root causes of poverty, illiteracy and youth idleness. The Kano expenditure of N1.5bn could have seeded dozens of training centres, funded hundreds of micro enterprises, or subsidised schooling for thousands of children. Those would be investments in stability and prosperity. Government sponsorship of mass weddings must stop. Those funds should be channelled to policies that will empower the people to enable them initiate families they can sustain. That is the recipe for safe families, secure communities and a more stable nation.
