Copyright tribuneonlineng
A lot has happened since Magistrate Halima Wali of a Kano State Magistrates’ Court ordered two popular TikTok content creators, Idris Mai Wushirya and Basira Yar Guda, to formalise their relationship through marriage within 60 days. The Magistrate’s directive followed a series of viral videos in which the duo, popular TikTok content creators, were seen engaging in romantic displays considered “indecent” by the Kano State Films and Video Censorship Board. Warning that failure to comply with its order within 60 days would be tantamount to contempt of court, Magistrate Wali had ordered the Kano State Hisbah Board to facilitate marriage between the two social media personalities. She further directed the chairman of the Kano State Films and Video Censorship Board to supervise the implementation of the marriage order. For a while, it appeared as if Idris Mai Wushirya and Basira Yar Guda would go ahead and comply with Magistrate Wali’s “Get married or else” order, and the only stumbling block was that Idris lived in a rented house rather than his own accommodation, which was the preference of his prospective spouse. In any event, all seemed set for a grand state- arranged wedding until the Kano State Hisbah Board announced the cancellation of the wedding on the grounds that “the alleged romantic relationship between the two TikTokers, which was originally referred to the board for formalisation, was found to be a pretentious arrangement staged by the offenders to evade legal consequences for their previous actions.” According to Deputy Commander of the Hisbah Board, Dr. Mujahedeen Aminuddeen, “the case will now be returned to court if the matter is not reconciled.” In other words, we are back to square one, and it is up in the air whether the TikTok romance of Idris Mai Wushirya and Basira Yar Guda, something, it is worth emphasising, originally intended to be a joke,will be scaled up into an everlasting union. We find certain elements about the entire episode deeply troubling. For one thing, we fail to understand the business of a government bureaucracy in the romantic displays of two people, and what exactly does the Kano State government stand to gain from a court-ordered marriage? What is the overriding state interest in effecting the union of two people, not to be conflated with state interest in marriage as a harbinger of social stability? In the original videos which sparked the interest of the state Censorship Board, Mai Wushirya and Yar Guda engaged in affectionate displays which purportedly “violated the moral and religious codes guiding public conduct in the state.” Why should a government bureaucracy be interested or invested in setting moral and religious code for its citizens? This much was reflected in the official statement of the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA), which noted that the original court order instructing the content creators to get married reflected “a grave misunderstanding of the limits of judicial authority under the Nigerian Constitution and constitutes an affront to the fundamental rights of the individuals concerned.” The association added: “No court has the power to compel any person to marry another person or two persons to mandatorily marry. It is indeed unconstitutional and therefore unlawful for any court to purport to have power to make such an order. Marriage, by its very nature, is a voluntary union between consenting adults. It cannot, under any circumstance, be imposed as a form of punishment, moral correction, or judicial remedy. No court in Nigeria possesses the constitutional authority to compel two persons to marry, and any attempt to do so violates the rights to personal liberty, dignity of the human person, and privacy as guaranteed under the 1999 Constitution (as amended).” We could not agree more with this statement and the underlying moral sentiment. The entire episode is yet another example of the social infantilisation in which many northern states have been directly implicated. The joke this time is on the Hisbah Board and the government of Kano State.
