Memories, creative industries and national transformation (VII)

According to UNESCO, “collaboration in regional ‘creative clusters’ is a strategic approach that will enable synergies between such countries and cities to promote the creative sector as a driver of development, able to penetrate even the most entrenched pockets of poverty. At the same time, a clustering strategy can serve to leverage the competitive edge […]

According to UNESCO, “collaboration in regional ‘creative clusters’ is a strategic approach that will enable synergies between such countries and cities to promote the creative sector as a driver of development, able to penetrate even the most entrenched pockets of poverty. At the same time, a clustering strategy can serve to leverage the competitive edge of each distinct regional product in the global marketplace.” Partnering foreign investors in the cultural industries is still in its infancy in Nigeria. Unfortunately, the down-turn in the security situation in the country has further aggravated the scepticism of the investors. While they are enticed by the potentials in the business, they are scared about their safety. Thus, to bring back the enthusiasm of foreign investors, we must find a solution to the precarious security situation in the country and a deliberate policy of partnering should be in place.
Any transformation agenda must answer these key questions which Obayemi asked two decades ago: “what are the indigenous imperatives upon which we can build an alternative economy and avoid dislocations?
Our National Development Plan (1981 – 85) muted pertinently in this direction when it stated in paragraph 7 chapter 3 that plan document reads:
True development must mean the development of man. The unfolding realisation of his creative potential: enabling him to improve his material condition of living through the use of resources available to him… A developed society is one that is capable of borrowing from other societies without becoming merely imitative and thereby losing its soil. It is clear from this perspective that there can be models or patterns of development of universal validity and applicability. Each society has to evolve its own life style, consonant with its cultural life stage (Okon 1991:38).
The historian, Olaoye (1995:40) also considered the intrinsic values of traditional arts and crafts to the development of modern science and technology and noted how the local arts and crafts available in Nigeria, including iron and metal technology, indigenous textile (ginning, carding, spinning, weaving, dying, pottery, leather works, traditional medicines etc) were sacrificed for ill-digested, inappropriately transferred western technology.
 For Nigeria to move forward, she must borrow from Britain  who placed local artisans, iron-blenders, weavers, etc, in the vanguard of industrial revolution. All of these should aim at development as an index  for national transformation. As summed up by Nkom (2008), development, regardless of how it is defined, ultimately entails an attempt to build a better society with the following prescriptions, signifying cultural factors as critical in the attainment of  national peace for economic empowerment as a society:
a. characterised by greater material prosperity and better life chances for the people;
b.  characterised by significant improvements in the people’s capacity to understand and to tap the resources of their environment for their own good and the good of humanity;
c.  which opens up new opportunities for personal upliftment and collective advancement; and
d.  in which creativity, productivity and popular participation are enhanced.
In conclusion, let me end this talk where I should, indeed, have started. This is what I choose to describe as the revisionist and philistine factors of culture—anti-cultural behaviour, ethos and attitudes that have impacted most negatively and deleteriously on the Nigeria society and its drive toward humane living and economic development. This pertains to corruptive culture and culture of corruption, which have buried themselves into the very membranous fabric of our society—with their numerous brethren and bi-products. I must however state that I do not subscribe to the common slogan that corruption is endemic and interred into the nation’s bones. After all, corruption is not a Nigerian lexicon. It is not Hausa, nor Ibo nor Yorba nor Tiv nor Ijaw. The root of corruption is found elsewhere, not here. The only difference is that, here, in Nigeria, it has become a contagion, spread leprously and pervasively, to every sector of our lives—top-bottom.
 One of its manifestations is the death-knell it sounds on our pristine African values, moralities, sensibilities, mores and ethos. Growing up as a child, I found that stealing was abhorred in the manner of leprosy among our people. They say it is better not to bear a child than to have a thief as a child. If you went to the farm and you found banana ripening on a neighbour’s farm, you plucked it and bring it back home to the owner. If your neighbour’s trap caught a grass-cutter, you fetched it, roast it and bring it home to the owner. Articles of trade are laid for sale without a hawker. You picked what you wanted to buy and left the exact amount that it cost. To be a thief is not to be an omoluabi (a child of good conduct, born after the image and essence of oluwa, God, Himself). If your child came back from school with a lead pencil that you did not buy for him, you chased him back to return the stolen item to wherever he got it. Now, all these values—codes of being and conduct—have vanished, almost totally from our society—urban or rural. If a school drop- out who could not buy himself a meal last month suddenly came back to the village with Mercedes Jeep or the ugly one called Hummer, began to build sprawling estates in the village, his parents do not bat an eye-lid. He becomes a hero, instantly. The Obas, Obis and Emirs garland him with meaningless titles. The civil servant who was clean and came back home on retirement without a house is derided and condemned. He is regarded as a fool and a failure. Any wonder why civil servants steal billions of pension and sundry sums and hide them in their bedroom?
A culture of settlement has become a mainstay of our consumerist, unproductive economy.  All our Governors go to Abuja at the end of every month to take their share of the oil money, which has become the source of our national doom, when it should have been a boom. Many of our Governors and religious leaders now buy or are given private jets, in a land where seventy percent of our roads are hardly motorable, including the road or path that seasonally leads to my home country. A cash and carry economy that kills industry, incentive and productivity has rendered Nigeria into a land where there is water, water, everywhere with none at all to drink. Now, they describe us as one of the fifteen failed or failing countries in the world. What kind of empowerment can take place in such a land where the tomorrow of the youth has been wafted and wasted by the ruiners of today’s governance?
Luckily, I have made my own suggestions above, with an incurable optimism that Nigeria can and will still wake from its present comatose, immobile state to take its place among the committee of passed nations.
Concluded.