Barometer
OF all the pressing issues of the day, and despite a chaotic transport system in Kano State, the state government announced on Christmas Day that it had placed a ban on men and women commuting in the same tricycle. It was an indirect imposition of the doctrine of separate but equal, a sort of gender apartheid which the state defends as being in conformity with Sharia law.
The announcement of the ban was in fact made by the Commander-General of the Sharia police (Hisbah Board), Harun Ibn-Sina, at the closing ceremony of the 77th Annual Islamic Vacation Course held in Kano. Barely a week later, however, the ban was lifted for reasons that are not quite easily explicable or straightforward.
That gender-based law, anchored on some unproven assault cases against women, was simply exhumed from the Ibrahim Shekarau era and replanted wholesale last December without any clue as to why the law proved impracticable in its first incarnation. But making light of the suspension of the law, a spokesman for the Abdullahi Ganduje government, Salihu Tanko-Yakassai, admitted that the government had had a rethink. Said he: “Yes, it’s true. Well, they (Hisbah Board) just want to review it. You know it was an old law that was enacted during the era of Ibrahim Shekarau.
So, the Hisbah committee was just reintroducing it. So, I think they want to just look at it again and make some adjustments because the realities back then and now are definitely not the same again. They want to look at the law again and see how practical and realistic it is now to see how they can adjust it. There are a lot of reports of females being abused especially in the evenings in Keke NAPEPs (tricycle), so this would see how the security can be improved.
I think there was a misconception in the new law passed. It is not like they are completely banning men and women from entering same tricycle. What they said is that if the keke picks a lady first, every other passenger has to be female and if it starts with a guy, the rest have to be guys. So, they just want to look at it again and see how practical and realistic it will be.”
It is not clear what led to the suspension of the law, whether it was pressure from tricycle operators and riders, as some have speculated, or a realisation that the state’s demographics would make the law impossible to implement. Kano is grappling with a burgeoning population, inadequate infrastructure, and limited resources. Implementing that gender-based law would easily have caused chaos and massive disruptions. Why this was not immediately obvious to Kano’s leaders before reinstituting the Shekarau law is hard to say. And to argue that such a measure would eliminate the crime of assault on women is, to put it mildly, harebrained. If assault on commuting women were to continue despite the ban, would the state respond by banning all tricycles? Kano is a big city; rather than conceiving silly laws in the name of religion, the state should find the right mix of policies and infrastructure, in this modern era, to move millions of its commuting populace.
In his attempt to refute the popular interpretation of the law, Mr Tanko-Yakassai argued that the ban was not about segregating men and women, but that once a tricycle picks a woman or man, it was bound by the new and now suspended law not to pick the opposite sex until the end of the trip. He is only being clever by half. The law segregates based on gender, no matter how ingeniously it is interpreted, and it is a silly segregation that inappropriately apes Saudi Arabia. It is discriminatory and impossible to implement in these parts for social and developmental reasons. The state should simply modernise its transport system instead of fooling around with Hisbah’s chimerical laws.
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