In April 2020, then governor of Kano State in north-west Nigeria, Abdullahi Umar Ganduje, took time off his expensive preoccupation with denying the ravages of the coronavirus on his state to preside over the “conversion” to Islam of two adolescent females. Governor Ganduje, who later became the Chairman of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), was not famous for his learning or piety. Instead, he was infamous for having been caught on camera stuffing what appeared to be wads of foreign currency into the capacious pockets of his traditional gowns.

Instead of making an effort to clear his name, Ganduje obtained a court order in March 2024 to preclude an investigation into these scandalous allegations. Why he felt qualified to become the vulgar face of ostentatious proselytising in the conversion of the girls may, therefore, remain a mystery. Following the conversion ceremony, however, there were suggestions that the young girls were then married off to men in Kano.

One month after Governor Ganduje’s venture into “Conversion TV”, on 21 May, at the opposite end of the country, Jane Iyang, a judge of the Federal High Court sitting in Yenagoa, capital of Bayelsa State in the Niger Delta, convicted Yunusa Dahiru (also known as Yunusa Yellow) for the crimes of trafficking in and rape of Ese Oruru, a child. The court sentenced Mr Dahiru to 26 years in prison. The Court of Appeal subsequently reduced the jail sentence to seven years, and in June 2023, Mr Dahiru was released from prison in Kano at the end of his abbreviated sentence.

While the country was caught in the maelstrom of the misadventures of Abdullahi Ganduje and Yunusa Dahiru, respectively, most forgot about the girls who were their victims.

In August 2015, Yunusa had taken schoolgirl, Ese Oruru, from the family home in Opolo, Yenagoa, without the consent of her parents to his home state in Kano, where he claimed to have converted her to Islam before “marrying” her. She was not more than 14 years old, and some reports suggested she was younger. Thereafter, he impregnated the teenager. In May 2016, she gave birth to a baby girl. For many girls, this would have been the end of their ambitions.

At the trial, the state charged Yunusa Dahiru with five counts of criminal abduction by means of coercion, transporting and harbouring Ese in Kano, illicit intercourse, sexual exploitation and rape of a child. When he took Ese from her family, Yunusa was 22.

At its beginning in 2015, the Ese Oruru case degenerated quickly into the usual Nigerian polarities of north against south and Christians against Muslims, which did profound injustice to the facts.

In September 2015, the Kano Emirate Council issued a statement detailing the steps taken by the Emir, Muhammadu Sanusi II, on the matter. At the request of the Emir, an investigation by the state’s shariah commission concluded that the girl was not yet of “the age where she could make the decisions attributed to her without the approval of her parents.” These were reportedly the decisions to change her faith and get married. As a result, the Emir directed that she should be handed over to the police “for return to her family.” In March 2016, Ese finally returned to her family in Bayelsa.

On all sides of the advocacy and the debate that ensued, the full panoply of Nigerian inartfulness was on display with religious, ethnic and other epithets freely traded. Conveniently, much of this noise was deliberately designed to avoid the issues or wield disgraceful trumps to mask over them.

The case of Ese Oruru clearly raised profound policy issues of social, legal and moral significance that go to the heart of Nigeria’s coexistence.

Let’s begin with the social. Marriage is at the foundation of the family, the basic unit of society. However, the parties to a marriage must have the capacity to consent to it. In Ese’s case, she was not more than 14 when she was taken from her state, Bayelsa, which defines the age of consent as 18. It should be clear to all but a pervert that a 14-year-old is hardly a position to consent to marriage nor to bear the physiological, emotional or psychological burdens that come with it.

To avoid these strictures of social policy, Yunusa decided to relocate Ese in three ways. First, physically, he removed the child from her family and from her state to Kano, where there was no Child Rights Law at the time. The State adopted a Child Rights Law only in 2023. Second, he relocated her civic rights from a statutory to a theological regime. Third, to complete her metamorphosis for his carnal pursuits, Yunusa purported to relocate Ese’s faith identity from Christianity to Islam.

So, to avoid a clear legal prohibition against child marriage, he willfully undertook the crime of trafficking in a child to facilitate the invention of a theological trump that excuses child marriage. But this scheme ran into a problem: Ese was a minor. She did not have the capacity in theology, physiology, and psychology to change her faith identity. If she could not, then the invented triumph was a fantasy. Yunusa’s response to this was to claim Ese was above her real age to confer on her a legal capacity that she could not have.

For the people invested in this sequence of bizarre contortions, their plea was that they were on a mission to win souls for the Almighty with what must have been a holy phallus. Yet, nowhere in the Holy Books of any of the great faiths is there any support for a project of genital conversion of minors or, indeed, of anyone.

What happened in Ese Oruru’s case was quite plainly the trafficking of a child for sexual exploitation under the artifice of faith. Every person of true faith should have been appalled at this counterfeiting of theology for child abuse. Religion is not supposed to be a defence to child abuse and cannot be.

In Nigeria, however, otherwise enlightened people appeared willing to be corralled into this debasement of faith. The day after the conviction of Yunusa Yellow, on May 22, 2020, presidential aide, Bashir Ahmad, promised an admirer on a social media platform that he would “try to contact those” who could help to change the verdict of the court against Yunusa. The response of the Presidency to this was eloquent silence. Mr Ahmad’s foray into the realm of rigging the courts ranked second in infamy only behind what must be taken as his confession of support at the highest levels of power in Nigeria for a notion of child abuse in the name of the Almighty.

The conviction of Yunusa Yellow was, therefore, a signal moment for legal and social policy and for the protection of coexistence in the enjoyment of the right to freedom of conscience and religion in Nigeria. It confirmed what should have been evident to everyone: that the Almighty is not a child molester.

The sequel to all this has been nothing short of inspirational. This month, Ese Oruru graduated with a second-class upper-division degree from the Department of Education Technology at the University of Ilorin. This attainment attests to her intellect and resilience. It is a remarkable story of what is possible when a country guarantees young girls equal opportunities to pursue their fullest potential.

A lawyer and a teacher, Odinkalu can be reached at chidi.odinkalu@tufts.edu