How I attempted to eradicate child marriage in Cross River community – Tunde Onakoya’s

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A Nigerian chess master Tunde Onakoya has spoken on his initiative to combat child marriages within a community in Cross River.

Onakoya highlighted that young girls, referred to as ‘money wives,’ are often subjected to being used as collateral and sold into marriages at an early age, sometimes even before they are born, all stemming from extreme poverty in the community.

Onakoya stated this during an interview shared on Instagram on Saturday, December 2 with media personality Chude Jideonwo.

He said: “So, I found out about this barbaric tradition in a place in Cross River called ‘Becheve’ where little girls are being used as collateral and sold into marriages. So, what that means is that if there’s a rich man in the village, you can go to him, beg him for like 10,000 naira, and tell him that when you have a daughter, even before the daughter is born that she becomes your wife. Sometimes the daughter could be as young as two, three, or four. You just give it to the man for N10,000, and sometimes it’s even for food. That’s the level of extreme poverty in that place.
It was somebody that sent it to me on Twitter, I think body that went to serve in that community, did his NYSC there and he found out, you know I just kept thinking about it, I spent six months just thinking about it, I knew that if we are going to take this up as an X project then we have to do it the right way and it going to take alot, it wasnt going to be like any other thing that we have done because one you are facing something deeply engrain cultural,it not enough to have good intentions you have to have solid plan, so it took us alot of time but we build a solid plan, I just got in a plain and travel down to the place no network reception nothing.
And we got there and went to the leads of the community and we told them that this is what his happening and it needs to stop and the man looked like this and he was like its a lie but the man was lying because even he had a ‘money wife’ and I told him that we are not going to leave and we stayed there on the Ogudu mountains and we stayed there for a week, they just kept lying.

“So, we met the pastor, Pastor Richard. Apparently, the person called Pastor Richard had been fighting against that tradition for about 30 years. He came to the community as a missionary, so meeting him just introduced me to that horrible world of children, girls who were victims of child marriage, and I met a lot of them that really broke me, so we had to change our approach by telling the leaders of the community that we just wanted to teach them something and were not here to free them; please allow us, and they eventually did. Then, we found out that the same pastor who had been advocating for this was also molesting some of the girls.

“So that is kind of throw a spanner into everything we were doing because now we could’nt like trust him anymore and we could’nt trust him with the children so the project just became complex and we have risked our life because I told twenty people to come with me to Coss River to come and end this child marriage and it jus became add, we stayed and we have to like cut him off from the project we have to start like clean meet people with genuine intentions we have to do alot of things eventually we get some of the girls we didn’t get all the girls we needed we get some of them are money wivies and some other girls that were children or money wives, when something like that happens for many years there is an underlined economy implications, so a money money wife that was given out at the age of ten to a man that is like eighty by the time she is seventeen she already had like two or three child and the man is already dead and because she ws given up as a child she as not developed any skill to earn so they leave in estreem poverty and that affects the chidren then the children have children that is how the circle of poverty rise.”