In the last week of June 2017, a video surfaced on the internet, as news broken by SaharaReporters. The video showed a potbellied middle aged man, dressing up in what looks like a hotel room, two young women in various states of undress milling around him. It is obvious from the setting, the ease with which the girls converse with the man and his general demeanour that some sort of sexual intimacy has just happened between them. The guerrilla news magazine accused Senator Bukar Ibrahim, former governor of Yobe state as the person in the video. And after a few days of stalling, Ibrahim conceded that indeed he was the man in the video, and that the sex between him and the girls was consensual and in his words a ‘private’ matter. He went further to suggest that the video was stolen from the girls and was used to blackmail him and that it was leaked because he refused to pay up.
There was little furore, and no repercussions from the Nigerian senate. Ibrahim went back to his life as a senator with no consequences.
This is the same Bukar Ibrahim who in 2000, during his tenure as governor of Yobe state, enforced Sharia law as part of Yobe state’s constitution and used that same constitution to harass women, two women even getting sentenced to death by stoning under his rule. It is a familiar story especially in the Nigerian muslim North, where Islam’s worst punishments are routinely inflicted on women and the poor, but the rich men who institute these laws as a way to curry favour from the North’s repressive religious leaders, get to sidestep the laws they instituted on others, even when there is video evidence proving they actually did violate said law.
Bukar Ibrahim is merely profiting off a system that bastardises Islam and weaponises it as a tool against women and the poor and denies them sexual agency. A system that he is quick to discard when he falls short of its unrealistic standards. Ibrahim, you might have scaled this fence, but we see you and we won’t forget.
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