You have been married for over 27 years and you don’t have a second wife even as a Muslim; how do you manage to achieve that?
Actually, I have been married for more than 30 years because I got married on December 9th, 1979. I have an extremely understanding wife and I must say I have just been very lucky. This is because the marriage institution is like a school. But it is the only institution where you are issued a certificate immediately you enter into it. In other schools, you’ll spend three or four years before you are given a certificate, but in marriage you are issued a certificate the day you are married.
The funny thing in this however is that in normal school, immediately you get your certificate you leave the school but in marriage, you are still in it learning, in fact that is the beginning of the learning. Marriage is a life long institution, where you have to work to make it better and better. Marriage is also a contract you enter into without knowing the terms of the contract. When you are going into a marriage, you barely know yourself and you are from different background, education, upbringing and a times different tribes. Yet you must try to make it work.
In my own case, I don’t think I owe the success of my marriage to anything or anybody but almighty Allah because it is Him that sustained us through the rough times.
My advice is that for every successful marriage, the wife and the husband should be partially blind and partially deaf. Why should they be partially blind and partially deaf? The wife will see many things and pretend that she did not see them and the same goes for the husband too. If the wife is not partially blind, she stands the risk of seeing every lady around her husband as a potential rival and that could be very dangerous, and if she is not partially deaf, she would listen to every story and believe every story that might not be good for the home. The same goes for the husband too.
Religion also plays a lot of role in keeping the family together. A family that prays together stays together and the fear of God should be paramount in the minds of the two of them.
They must also endeavour to live by the tenets of their religions. Islam is particularly in favour of men treating their wives in the most humane manner. The Almighty Allah also counsels that we should marry among the singles and take good care of them.
I am a Muslim and some people say that Islam encourages polygamy, but that is not totally correct because the Qu’ran also admonishes us to ensure that we love the two women equally. If you can’t love them equally, don’t bother to have more than one wife.
Is that why you married just one wife?
I need to be very sincere here. I don’t think I can cope with more than one wife. My wife has not given me any reason to look elsewhere.
Who take more challenges in marriage, is it the man or the woman?
It depends at what point in the marriage. At the early stage, it is the man, because at that time the woman is still very young and attractive and the man has not acquired the patience and maturity that is required and incidentally, the woman matures faster than the man.
The fact is also that it is the woman’s liberty that was also curtailed at the beginning of the marriage and the man is under pressure. But at time goes on, the table is turned and when the woman gets to 50 years of age, she starts getting terribly insecure in the marriage.
Why?
This is because at age 50 her options are limited. At 50, she had reached menopause; at 50 she already had all her children; she would also have passed her reproductive stage. At age 50, her career may be at its end, at 50, she would no longer be the ‘figure 8’ that the man married at the beginning because of the children and the wear and tear of womanhood.
Meanwhile, the man starts blossoming at fifty and he has so many options before him- he can remarry and have children or even start a new family all over again. So this makes the woman a bit insecure, and this is the time they need their husband more to reassure them.
I must also say that having children also has a way of stabilizing marriages because when the marriage is blessed with children, the stability of the marriage would contribute in a long way in the emotional stability of your children. It is not unusual for children from broken homes to have an unstable emotion. It is not unusual for children with broken homes to seek refuge outside the home and in the process get involved in so many vices.
Our parents always counsel against divorce because of the consequences of the action.
How will it look if the children are reading in the newspapers that their parents are disagreeing when they are also raising their own homes too? You must sacrifice for them too because you need to consider that your daughters are in other peoples homes as wife and your son is in another home as husband.
How and where did you meet your wife?
If it is today that it happened, I will probably have been accused of segxwal harassment. I did my youth service at FESTAC 77 and we were asked to look for young men and ladies who could work as protocol assistance, and because I was bi-lingual, I worked in the protocol department and was asked to recruit part-time students on holiday that will work for the period of the vacation. I asked a friend for help and he gave me a list of three or four, one of them turned out to be my wife eventually.
The first day I saw her, I prayed to God that this should be my wife and God answered my prayer.
It did not just happen. I knew what I was looking for and I saw them in her and we courted for three and half years and we did not get married until December 1979.
You said you knew what you were looking for; what should a young guy look out for in a woman?
When you are young, what attracts you to a woman is the beauty, but it is not like that. Beauty should be deeper than the skin; we should look for the inner beauty as well. Yes, no one wants to marry an ugly lady, but basically it should go beyond the outer beauty. You can live with a not too beautiful woman, but what you can’t live with is an incompatible person.
First, a young man looking for a wife needs God’s guidance because it is only Almighty Allah that knows women.
Why do you think youths today regard marriage as an imprisonment through which they lose their freedom?
It is the society, particularly the parents that are to be blamed for that unfortunate development. When we were growing up, our parents spent more time with us than the time we spend with our own children today. We were thought the basic, core values of life via folktales at the feet of our fathers and mothers; we stayed more with our parents and we were able to imbibe more core values.
Today it is not so because parents are too busy. By the time our kids are two or three years old, we send them to nursery schools and they spend more time with our househelps than the time they spend with us. Unfortunately many of these househelps are uneducated and unlettered. The only learning they got re from home videos. Unfortunately, this is what they impact on our children. Not many of us can say we know our children well. We leave early in the morning and instruct the housemaid to give the kids noodles. The housemaid could simply eat the noodles and give the children ‘garri’ and they dare not complain.
I will seriously advise that we should spend more time with our children; it is then that we can impact those core values we got from our parents on them. Pushing them out by age two or three is not good. We put them in boarding schools and by the time they passed out of the primary and secondary school, we send them to UK or USA to further their studies and they come back as a person we don’t know at all.
How do we reverse this trend because divorce is already on the increase in Nigeria?
It is the too much pressure we put on these children. Unfortunately successive governments have failed Nigerians and those privileged few who could afford to provide good schools and social amenities and make Nigeria a society that could be compared to those of the UK have misappropriated the funds for themselves and used it to send their own children abroad. When the kids come back they meet the same squalid situation that their parents were responsible for and they simply cannot adjust. They are used to the orderliness of America and Europe so they can’t cope here in this disorder.
The middle class estates like Surulere are gradually losing their innocence so when these students come back they don’t want to stay there so their parents have to subsidize them by finding a house in Lekki or Ikeja GRA. They are not earning their living but they are still living on their parents. But because their lifestyle is far greater than their small income so they will continue to live on subsidy from their parents who will buy them cars and do stuff for them.
Is it correct that the average Nigerian married man has mistresses outside his matrimonial home?
If we say that every Nigerian married man has mistresses outside, we will be unfair to Nigerian men. We need to look at what is happening globally too. There is hardly a month that you won’t hear stories of one star having problem in his marriage. Here in Nigeria, our men are more civilized and humane in the way we handle issues. For instance, you won’t hear of a man poisoning his wife because he wants to marry his mistress. Here in Nigeria, people are more open about their extramarital affairs. In Europe, people will have extramarital affairs and stubbornly deny it until someone blows the whistle.
The lesson is any attempt by any man to behave like an angel will fail. We should curb our excesses and be disciplined. To say that Nigerian men are promiscuous is not correct either.
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