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CENTRE FOR HUMAN RIGHTS
RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT |
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CONFERENCE TITLE: Politics, Society and Rights in Traditional Societies: Models and Prescriptions for Contemporary Nation Building in Nigeria. A two-day conference organized by the Benin Institute in collaboration with the Carnegie Council for Ethics and International Affairs, 16th-17th May, 2002. ARTICLE TITLE: CBO Involvement and Participation in Local Government
Decision Making: the CHRRD
Experience in Southwest Nigeria CO-AUTHORS: § Comrade Mashood Erubami, Executive Director, Centre for Human Rights Research and Development, Ibadan § Mr. Ian R. Young, Research and Documentation Officer, Centre for Human Rights Research and Development, Ibadan (CUSO Coöperant) AUTHORS’ ADDRESS: Centre for Human Rights Research and Development, 37, Old Ife Road, Opposite Green Springs Hotel, P.O. Box 1084, Agodi Post Office, Ibadan, Oyo State, NIGERIA, West Africa. Tel. 234-2-712336 ABSTRACT From
2000 to the present, the Centre for Human Rights Research and Development,
a ten-employee independent NGO based in Ibadan, with financial support from
the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, Lagos, and the United States Information Service,
Lagos, has embarked upon a unique series of civil society-building
workshops at the local government level in Oyo, Osun, Ondo, Ekiti, Kogi and
Kwara States. Approximately 800 individuals have attended these
workshops, representing civil servants, councillors and chairs of local
government administrations, traditional rulers, market women, farmers,
labourers, NGOs and social activists, students, police, and others.
The goal of these workshops is to promote the electorate's
understanding of democratic development, and enhance dialogue between grassroots
citizens and elected officials at the ward and LGA levels, via
two community-based organisations (CBO): a Citizens' Constituency Forum, and a Public Complaints
and Conflict Resolution Committee. The
long-term aim is empowering intended beneficiaries, the indigent and the
powerless, to realise their human rights, broaden the choices and
opportunities available to them, and achieve their potential and goals through
popular participation in decision-making. CHRRD
and its local partners are operating at the nexus of civil society strengthening
and good governance capacity-building at the third tier of government. Two
follow-up impact assessment workshops have been conducted in January and
March 2002, that brought together over two hundred participants from these states.
These assessments included both formal progress reports from each
LGA, as well as recommendations from small group problem-solving sessions.
This paper highlights some of the successes and challenges
associated with this intervention. CONTENTS FORGING
DIALOGUE BETWEEN COMMUNITY-BASED ORGANISATIONS AND THEIR LOCAL GOVERNMENTS WHAT
TO SALVAGE? WHAT TO JETTISON?.
9
INTRODUCTION Without
belabouring you all with definitions of the key words in the theme of this
Conference, permit me (I am speaking on behalf of both authors of this paper) to
describe my understanding of them to provide an objective basis for discussion
of the substantive issues inherent in the topics.
Discussing politics, society and rights, their models in traditional
societies and offering prescriptions for contemporary nation-building appear to
me to be a discussion on how cultural influences and societal development and
traditional practices can be adjusted to meet new demands.
The theme of this conference is timely in contents and context,
especially coming at a time with the diffusion of foreign culture into our
contemporary lifestyle at the expense of our old patterns of life have created
seemingly unsolvable crises in the name of development and modernisation.
Traditional
practices have been largely abhorred by all efforts at modernisation as if it
has no way of influencing the development processes and contemporary
nation-building. The Nigerian,
Claude Ake captured this aptly when he posited that “African culture has
fiercely resisted and threatened every project that fails to come to terms with
it” (Ake, 1996). Therefore, the
conference theme is setting the pace for coming to terms with these realities. Regardless
of over four decades of clamouring for development dividends, our economy has
remained static and unimpressive. The
real value of income regimes is falling, the state of our infrastructure is
appalling, insecurity is enveloping every stratum of the society, and the
quality of life for citizens is nose-diving while social institutions can not
serve their purposes. Above all,
there is a visible absence of social guarantees.
This has resulted from total abandonment of traditional practices which
have been made consciously to give way to modernisation resulting from
colonisation. Other reasons
adducible from the present state of our underdevelopment are the absence of
legitimacy and exclusivity suffered by citizens in the process of
decision-making at all levels of governance, particularly at the grassroot
constituency, where “indigenous communities have been providing some measure
of refuge from the coercive power of the central state”.
Legitimacy of political power by colonial lords and their post-colonial
agents have remained elusive despite the fact that “rules and laws were
profusely made and value propagated because of arbitrary use of absolute
power” (Ake, 1996). Citizens are
not taken into confidence over issues that affect their lives, as there was no
platform which seeks cross-party relations and allows citizens to engage elected
political office holders in dialogue, or make contributions to development
projects from conceptualisation to execution stages.
People are distanced from their government as no interactive relationship
is maintained for constructive engagement between the representatives and their
electors. The
theme of a Yoruba dramatic film released in early 2002, Agogo Éewò˛
(“The Forbidden Bell”) is reaching back upon cultural traditions to confront
contemporary societal maladies. A
newly-appointed oba (Yoruba traditional ruler) resolves to rid his
administration of corrupt advisors, and he enlists the support of traditional
story-tellers and Ifa divination priests. An
ancient agogo bell is retrieved from its repository in a cave, and each of the
oba’s chiefs is required to drink from it, as a form of truth serum. Some months later, in a public hearing, the bell is slowly
struck a total of six times. By the
third or fourth stroke, some of the oba’s advisors admit their complicity in
acts of corruption, but after the sixth stroke, the two most egregious
councillors who failed to confess their wrongdoings immediately give up the
ghost. This
charming and timely tale underlines the power of tapping the wisdom of
indigenous knowledge and belief systems in contemporary problem-solving. Respect for cultural rights preserves the dignity of people.
During the 1950s, Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta held up an idealised version of
Kenya’s traditional past as a counter-proposal to Western modernization. But
the traditions of both the mythical and historical past cannot offer us a
uniformly pristine Utopia, and their wholesale resurrection would be as
ill-advised, sterile and reactionary as their disregard.
David P. Forsythe (2000) observes that “through relentless pressure
over time, human rights and other civil society groups were successful in
expunging the ‘traditional’ cultural practices of slavery, footbinding and
suffrage.” The footbinding of women, a cultural practice embedded in
Chinese society for a millenium, was totally eradicated in the space of one
generation through a concerted moral and political campaign, unaccompanied by
other industrial or economic determinants (Keck and Sikkink, 1998).
Initiated by British missionaries in the 1874, the anti-footbinding cause
was embraced by Chinese nationalists in 1895 under the non-denominational
coalition known as the “Natural Foot Society”.
Shortly after the 1911 revolution, a decree banned the practice.
A survey in the 1920s found that 99% of Chinese women born prior to 1890
had their feet bound, compared to 20% for those born from 1910-1914, and no new
cases were reported for those born post-1919.
The European-initiated anti-female-circumcision movement in Kenya has had
less success, with 100% of Kenyan women having been circumcised in the 1920s,
compared to about 50% in the 1990s. In
part this was because the campaign never acquired domestic sponsors. According
to development economist Yujiro Hayami (2001) the fundamental question for
developing economies is “how … to adjust cultural and international
environments so as to be consistent with modern technology borrowed from
advanced economies.” The
implication is that “cultural adjustment” or “behavioural modification”
is required to comply with economics’ “structural adjustment” and
“modernization”. Majid Rahnema
(1997) writes that we need to “learn the arts of listening and being attentive
to one another … such
relationships could allow the younger and more active members in each group to
combine their greater knowledge and sensitivity to the modern world with the
wisdom from tradition.” Ake
(1992) summed it up by saying that “democracy needs to be rooted in African
social realities.” Deeply rooted
cultural values clearly represent both hindrances and lubricants for communal
societies to evolve, adapt and “develop”.
One challenge for modernization and community development from our
perspective, therefore, is to reconcile the comprehensive development
framework’s neo-liberal trinity of civil society, good governance and
adherence to Western-defined human rights standards – what Bonny Ibhawoh
(2000) might label as the “dynamic paradigm” – with a locale-specific
African counter-discourse opposing the construction of formal democratic systems
in favour of indigenous cultural practices – a “conservative” or “static
paradigm”. The challenge is to
fit together international donor-driven agendas with desires and proposals
elicited from the poor and disempowered through community participation.
If, through this dialogue, no reasonable fit can be attained, then
grassroots African civil society needs to identify indigenous solutions.
As in Latin America, these nation-building strategies could be based upon
organic social movements and popular struggles, as opposed to the imposition of
multi-party, one-person one-vote democracies.
Upon his election as President of South Africa, Nelson Mandela took the
“unusual” move of inviting a prominent leader of the opposition party to
join his cabinet. An inclusive
democracy, as opposed to a majoritarian one, acknowledges the rights to
self-determination of cultural minorities, and mandates the elected majority to
remain accountable to minority interests (UNDP, 2000:57). Eunice
Sahle (2000) observes that the imposition of economic liberalisation and free
market remedies on Africa, coupled with the rhetoric of democratic institution
strengthening is ahistorical. In
early 2002, South African trade union leader Trevor Ngwame, at the World Social
Forum in Brazil called on Africans to reject NEPAD, the New Partnership for
Africa’s Development, claiming that the plan is falsely premised on the
assumption that African “backwardness” results from the continent’s
erstwhile exclusion from “globalisation” trends.
Ngwame contends that “globalisation” will in fact engender worsening
poverty for the continent (Wiwa, 2002). There
is recent macroeconomic evidence both for and against this stance.
Defining poverty broadly as a composite of income, longevity and
literacy, the United Nations Development Programme in its 2001 Human
Development Report showed that the number of people living under conditions
of “low human development” has declined by one-half between 1975 and 1999, i.e.
from 1.1. billion persons down to 500 million.
Over the same period, the proportion classified as living in “medium
human development” rose from 1.6 billion to 3.5 billion, and those in the
“high human development” category increased from 650 million to 900 million.
An analysis of global income inequality data from the World Bank and UNDP
(UNDP, 2001), based on “purchasing power parity” (PPP) adjustments, shows
that income inequality over the last quarter-century has in fact diminished
between the richest fifth of the world’s population and poorest fifth, from a
ratio of 14.9 down to 13.1, i.e. the richest fifth of the world’s
population now possesses thirteen times as much purchasing power as the poorest
fifth, down from fifteen times in 1970. But,
when focusing on the extreme ends of the world income distribution curve, the
richest and poorest deciles of world population, the ratio of income
inequality has in fact increased from 19.4 to 26.9.
The 10% with the lowest incomes represent primarily nationals of
sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, and it is these peoples that
have thus far been marginalised from global economic liberalisation and
the North’s obsession with capitalist market solutions.
Sub-Saharan Africa comprises about 10% of the global population (expected
to increase to 13% by 2015) but it receives less than one per cent of global
direct foreign investment, about 18% of the total OECD overseas development
assistance budget (UNDP, 2001) and accounts for 40% of the wars currently being
fought globally (North-South Institute, 2000).
In view of the above, the Centre for Human Rights Research and
Development has aligned with the school of thought that there could still be
benefits in our pre-colonial experiences in the context of politics, societal
development and human rights, using this belief to design programs that seek to
empower civil society. Civil
society capacity-building is about strengthening the relationships between
people and their governments, between people and the private sector and between
local communities and global forces.
In the North, civil society, particularly the social advocacy networks,
use the politics of public and peer pressure, publicizing incontestable facts to
shame and embarrass the perpetrators of social injustice, and as such these
organisations must operate in an environment of accountability, with uncensored
access to and dissemination of information.
In the African context, civil society and the systems it challenges may
choose to operate less under paths of direct confrontation and retribution, and
more under paths of reconciliation and sharing of responsibility and blame.
During the 1990s, annual urban growth rates in Nigeria were double that
for the nation as a whole, 5.3% per annum vs. 2.5%.
According to statistics from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP,
2001), 43% of Nigerians were urban dwellers in 1999, and it is predicted that in
2015, the proportion will increase to 55%. Urbanisation trends are overlaid by
strong inter-cultural differences, e.g. in 1963, it was found that among 35
Nigerian ethnic groups, three - the Efik Yoruba and Ijaw - had already one-third
or more of their populations living in settlements with 20,000 or more persons,
whereas among the Igbo and Hausa, the urbanisation rates were only 16% and 12%
respectively and the mean rate for all Nigerians was 16% (UNDP, 1998).
So how can the core cultural values of small rural communities undergoing
intense out-migration of their young graduates be upheld?
One answer is to confront the future and not lament the past:
in Ibadan, one of the principal destinations for rural Nigerian migrants,
CHRRD’s Public Complaints and Conflict Resolution Panel operates within a
multi-ethnic and multi-religious urban context, where value conflicts invariably
arise between such parties as landlords and tenants, employers and employees.
Often these individual parties’ origins lack a mutually acknowledged
traditional resolution mechanism. Another
answer also lies here: the indigenes’ associations and descendants’ unions
that are prevalent in Nigeria’s large metropolises.
As the research of Lillian Trager (2001) and others has shown, sons and
daughters who were born and grew up in the small towns and villages of the
hinterland, only to migrate to the big cities and abroad and achieve financial
prosperity, continue to play significant roles in the development of their
“home communities”, by returning there several times a year, and either
making direct financial contributions or lobbying their local and state
government representatives for infrastructural projects.
Interestingly, the focus of these projects appears in some instances to
be shifting away from the “traditional” tangible, ostentatious symbols of
philanthropic munificence, such as the construction of traditional rulers’
palaces, personal residences and town halls towards more “systemic”
development projects that benefit home towns’ entire citizenry, including
motorable roads, pipe-borne or borehole water supply, electrification, community
banks, market buildings, libraries and even child day-care centres. These studies have also found that indigenes’ and community
“welfare” associations hold higher credibility with their beneficiaries than
urban, international donor-driven non-governmental organisation (NGOs), because
they have maintained life-long ties with their communities, and therefore hold a
more informed understanding of the context of the community’s problems and
needs. If “development”
is fairly narrowly and conventionally operationalised by indicators of physical
and social infrastructure, then UNDP data at the Nigerian state level
demonstrate that those zones most heavily urbanised - Cross River State and the
southwest of the country - enjoy
significantly better standards of living than the rest of the country (UNDP,
1996).
Based on attitudinal interviews and focus groups with 270 Nigerians
during 2000 and 2001, Dr. Kenna Owoh (2001), currently Director of the Canadian
International Development Agency’s Programme Support Unit in Abuja, found
relatively close agreement between the opinions of local government councillors
and female members of the electorate for encouraging grassroots democratic
development. Fifty four per cent of
municipal politicians and 51% of grassroots women stated that education, female
literacy training, and women’s empowerment /microcredit schemes were the most
effective tools. Surveyed
non-governmental organisations had very different views:
88% believed that microcredit programmes and leadership training for
women were the most effective. Dr
Owoh’s baseline data suggest a need for improved dialogue between Nigerian
NGOs, whose agendas are largely dictated by foreign donors, and the immediate
direct and ultimate intended beneficiaries of these NGOs’ interventions.
Periodic follow-up surveys over time could determine whether shifts in
attitudes are occurring in the desired direction.
Participatory grassroots polls of what people want have also been carried
out by Nigeria’s UNDP office in 1997. Two
hundred Nigerian communities participated in a series of “State Vision
Studies” that utilised individual surveys and focus groups, reaching between
150 and 200 individuals in each community. The Anambra State Vision Study revealed that people do not
simply define development in terms of physical and social infrastructure;
they also want local involvement and ownership of those projects, through
employment and ongoing maintenance (UNDP, 1998).
There is historical continuity here, as Yoruba townspeople with the
exception of members of the royal households were typically enlisted to repair
the town walls and refurbish the palace buildings (Barber, 1991).
In this light, the Centre for Human Rights Research and Development,
CHRRD, is also gathering baseline attitudinal data from which we hope to
eventually construct longitudinal profiles.
And we have allies to triangulate our data:
Ibadan’s Development Policy Centre, in conjunction with the United
Nations Economic Commission for Africa and 21 other African democracies, is
currently completing a comprehensive evaluation of progress towards good
governance in Nigeria. Among the
three complementary survey instruments is a 39-question household survey
questionnaire designed to gauge public opinion on the nature of political
participation, institutional effectiveness and accountability, quality and
accessibility of services, and perceptions of the judiciary and law enforcement
(Aiyede, 2002). The annual corpus
of UNDP development indicators, coupled with state-level analyses periodically
published by UNDP’s Nigeria office provides additional quantitative and
longitudinal data (UNDP, 1996, 1997, 1998). FORGING DIALOGUE BETWEEN COMMUNITY-BASED ORGANISATIONS AND THEIR LOCAL GOVERNMENTS
Founded in Ibadan in 1992 by former trade union activist Mashood Erubami,
the Centre for Human Rights Research and Development, CHRRD, is an independent,
grassroots, non-sectarian, not-for-profit, NGO with ten employees.
CHRRD promotes development by protecting human rights and monitoring
their violation in the urban and rural areas of southwest Nigeria through
education, and preventive and remedial advocacy.
CHRRD implements an integrated cluster of democratic development
interventions, including a Conflict Resolution and Management Clinic staffed by
lawyers and paralegals, human rights education and peaceful conflict resolution
advocacy with the Nigerian Union of Road Transport Workers.
One CHRRD affiliate, Mr Bayowa Adediji, is currently on six-month
assignment in Canada, representing Nigerian interests in the lead-up to the 28th
Summit of the G8 scheduled to take place the Canadian Rocky Mountains in June,
2002.
NGOs across Nigeria are active in providing legal assistance to
disadvantaged and powerless members of society.
The Legal Research and Resource Development Centre, in Yaba, Lagos,
received funding from the Friedrich Ebert Foundation in Lagos to establish a
free legal aid service and counselling unit in Benin City.
Also in Lagos, LEDAP, the Legal Defense and Assistance Project,
coordinated the free legal advice of 135 lawyers to assist 450 indigents,
including prisoners, human rights violation victims, and battered women in 2001
(LEDAP, 2002). In Port Harcourt,
the Institute for Human Rights & Humanitarian Law, IHRHL, has developed a
community-based structural paralegal network (SPANE) which sets up paralegal
committees in villages, trains “barefoot lawyers”, and provides community
education on matters such as arrest, bail, marriage,and rape.
Of course, there are many pre-colonial antecedents to these modern
conflict resolution fora, and many traditional rulers in southern Nigerian
villages continue to adjudicate in civil and domestic conflicts, by applying
native and customary law while Shari’a is practised in the north. From
2000 to the present, CHRRD, with financial support from the Friedrich Ebert
Stiftung, Lagos, and the United States Information Service, Lagos, has embarked
upon a unique series of civil society-building workshops at the local government
level in Oyo, Ondo, Ekiti, Kogi and Kwara States.
Approximately 800 individuals have attended these workshops, comprising
civil servants, councillors and chairs of local government administrations,
traditional rulers, market women, farmers, labourers, NGOs and social activists,
students, police, and others. The
typical ratio of men to women attendees is two is one.
These workshops attempt to promote the electorate's understanding of
democratic development, and enhance dialogue between grassroots citizens and
elected officials at the ward and local government area (LGA) levels, via a
Citizens' Constituency Forum, and via the creation of Public Complaints and
Conflict Resolution Committees. The
long-term aim is empowering individuals and groups to realise their human
rights, enhance their capabilities and choices in life, and achieve their
potential and goals through popular participation in decision-making.
CHRRD’s one-day “constituency-building” workshops begin with
participatory discussions led by CHRRD staff members on democracy and human
rights within the context of the attendees’ communities.
Elements of Yoruba culture, as expressed in the oral tradition of
proverbs are explored in these discussions.
For example, the Yoruba proverb “Oro ko se so afi ka pana” which
means “We can only speak the truth when we turn off the light” is indicative
of a traditional cultural value which is at odds with the current democratic
dispensation emphasising public accountability, as it suggests that only a
favoured few may know the truth. But
another Yoruba proverb is more compatible with current conditions: “Ti
isu eni bajina, a ma nda owo boje”, or “If you have conducted your
affairs ethically, there is no reason to shun transparency and
accountability.” CHRRD staff
propose to participants that if certain traditional practices among the Yoruba,
such as the killing of twins, and the genital mutilation of girls have passed
out of favour, then why cannot the culture of corruption also be jettisoned?
In the afternoon, the participants are randomly assigned into five small
discussion groups of about twenty persons each, to identify answers to questions
such as “What are the problems facing our elected officials and how can we
assist them” and “What are the challenges facing democracy, and the
solutions?”. In a closing plenary
session, a spokesperson designated by each group shares their responses with the
workshop attendees as a whole, and these responses have been summarised into
written reports for CHRRD’s funders. In
addition, each workshop’s proceedings are recorded on videotape and available
from the CHRRD offices in Ibadan. Table
1 collapses and ranks the many group-defined solutions from two recent workshops
into a parsimonious set of eight themes that were most frequently proferred.
It illustrates that grassroots citizens and their elected officials
invoke not only structural and political remedies to effective third tier
democracy – things like accountability and training of the electorate and
elected - but also broader economic, social and cultural interventions,
including poverty eradication and the promotion of ethno-religious tolerance. TABLE
1. Thematic Synthesis of Small
Group Discussions from Recent CHRRD Workshops in Ondo and Ekiti States
CONCLUSIONS
Having acquired some baseline data, it is CHRRD’s intention to
periodically re-assess past workshop participants’ opinions, to determine
whether our interventions are meeting the intended beneficiaries’
needs. We also will continue to monitor evidence for specific
improvements in civil-society strengthening, including instances and case
studies of successful conflict resolution, and “more active censure of
politicians and public servants” (Fowler, 1997). Monitoring and evaluating aid interventions is not, however,
just about highlighting one’s successes; it’s also about publicising our
failures and our efforts to correct them. About
one-half of the local government’s reports in the impact assessments run
earlier this year reported logistical constraints, such as lack of funding, lack
of support or interest from LGA councillors to regularly hold the Citizens’
Constituency Forum meetings. It is
incumbent upon CHRRD and its local partners to confront these challenges to
sustainability. Ian Smillie (1995)
estimates that “most NGO interventions probably miss the poorest 5-10%” and
this is undoubtedly the case with CHRRD’s constituency-building exercises,
even though market traders, farmers and labourers are mobilized to attend.
Ultimately, practitioners of civil-society building need to address
questions like “Does a stronger civil society actually lead to improved
democracy?” and “Does democracy lead to improved services, greater equity
and less oppression of key social groups?” (Pratt, 2002).
The answers, in tandem with qualitative and quantitative development
indicators from other organisations should be broadly disseminated to inform
future directions for development action. WHAT TO SALVAGE? WHAT TO JETTISON?
The selective re-incorporation of “traditional values” and
“customary practices” into the fabric of contemporary society obviously
poses many challenges. Who defines
the traditional values and practices, who selects those “worthy of
resurrection”, and conversely, which currently-held traditional values are
worthy of expurgation? When the
elders from various family lineages in the northern Oyo Yoruba town of Okuku
were asked by British anthropologist Karin Barber in the 1970s about “past
time”, invariably their responses hearkened to the nineteenth century.
This “traditional” past was remembered as a turbulent period of
profound social dislocations: the
wars between Fulani, Ilorin, Ibadan and Ekiti forced many Okuku residents to
seek refuge for decades in the neighbouring town of Ikirun; it was also a period
marked by the acquisition of power and wealth by many chiefs through
slave-raiding and slave-trading (Barber, 1991).
“Harnessing the power of customary practices” through co-optation
into contemporary nation-building was a political tactic employed by the British
colonial authorities during the 1930s. By
ostensibly keeping the existing political system in place, cultural legitimacy
was theoretically conferred. However,
in some cases the colonialists subtly altered the rules.
For example, the system of selecting a new traditional ruler, chieftain
or king (oba) from the various royal families was distorted and immobilised.
Prior to colonialisation, each of the ruling households in towns such as
Okuku staged vigorous campaigns to promote their family’s candidate, but the
British redefined the procedure such that each of the ruling families must rotate
in a fixed unalterable order (Barber, 1991).
Barber’s study of the praise chants, or oriki of “big men” showed
that successful Yoruba men were, and still are, intensely competitive, driven
sometimes by the use of destructive power to achieve self-aggrandisement
(Barber, 1991). But the pathways to
self-aggrandisement have been altered, just as changes in the economic base
affect the super-structure, culture. Prior
to the nineteenth century, wealthy men supported a large household of family
members, farm labourers and acolytes, who in turn swelled the “big man’s”
reputation. Modernity introduced
alternative power opportunities – employment in the government, professions
and business – that circumvented the community hierarchy.
Just as today, “money politics” characterised pre-colonial Yoruba
towns in the manner that contests for the succession to the oba’s throne were
carried out. From a large pool of
eligible candidates within the royal lineages, competitors vied for support from
the chiefs, family members and towns-people at large by distributing presents
and food. However, it was the
town’s chiefs that secretly selected the next oba via Ifa divination, and not
the magnitude of the candidates’ “bribes”.
Unfortunately, the Ifa oracle was not infallible, as many obas were
deposed following bitter disputes – a traditional Yoruba form of
“democracy”. “Deeply rooted
in Yoruba culture” Barber writes, is the sense of pervasiveness of enemies and
rivals “full of malice and envy” – a sense of generalised mistrust.
This belief extends into the current era of politically-motivated acts of
violence. But all except the slaves
in Yoruba society enjoyed the opportunity for social mobility, predicated on the
principle of Ori or individual destiny.
Men outside the royal families were given chieftancy titles when they
acquired sufficient coteries of followers.
One traditional Yoruba value that warrants re-incorporation into the
contemporary fabric is the acknowledgement of the importance and autonomy of
invidividual towns and cities as basic societal units (Barber, 1991: 210).
Decentralisation and re-federalisation of the Nigerian state would
re-empower individual communities (International IDEA, 2001).
Consistently in CHRRD’s constituency-building workshops and their
follow-up impact assessments, participants requested that the “zero allocation
problem” be addressed at the third tier of government.
Looking back on our traditional practices, the political legacy of
colonialism played a significant role in alienation and not transformation
of our society in the way lands were redistributed and production lines were
preferenced, resorting to forced labour, churned-out administrative instruments
and leglislated taxes to induce the breakup of traditional social relations of
production, the atomisation of society, and the process of proletarianisation
(Ake, 1996). Throughout the period
of colonial politics, the state expended absolute and arbitrary powers which
vestiges their local successors inherited to shun the good sides of traditional
practices. Much as some cultural
practices like human sacrifices infringed on fundamental rights to life under
our traditional order, arbitrariness and exercise of absolute power also framed
colonial politics. Many quickly
refer to slave trading as part of the dark culture of our past.
This is wrong, as the slave trade subsisted because there was an
objective basis for its market – poverty is it.
Later the slave traders transformed their domination of the slave trade
into hegemonic war by resorting to forceful conscriptions of the citizens as
slaves to avoid payment using destructive war instruments to separate children
from parents and husbands from wives. Examples
of Yoruba proverbs expressing dissent to slavery include: Yoruba:
Ęrú ní Baba, ò¸nà lojìn
English: A slave too has a father, he is only far away Yoruba:
Bi a tí bi ęrú ni a bí o¸mo¸
English: We give birth to a slave the same way we give birth to a free
child: there is no preferential
treatment. Yoruba:
A ti rí o¸mo¸bá to ndé ęrú ati ri ìwò¸fà to kó¸ pàté¸sì
English: We have seen
princes who have become slaves, and bonded labourers who have erected buildings
(became wealthy).
Modern politics did not bring anything new to us.
Before colonisation, our traditional practices guaranteed the rights to
personal liberty by the sense of justice prevalent then.
People were not just being arbitrarily arrested and detained unless he or
she fell foul of the social norms. Yet
the right to appeal from the Mogaji (family head) to the Baale (area head) was
in place. In the process, fair hearing is seen to be guaranteed.
People’s rights to own property were guaranteed as land was held by the
king or baale in trust for the people; disputes arising from land acquisition
have been settled without rancour. Of
course, freedom to worship was demonstrated by the tolerance of other religions,
guaranteeing the rights to freedom of thought, conscience and religion.
The right to freedom of association and peaceful assembly was recognised
under our traditional order, people freely belong to professions, town
societies, religious groups without hindrance, while freedom of movement was
never unnecessarily restricted unless it would endanger the rights of others.
What is apposite to say is that most of the modern rights are derived and
modelled after guaranteed rights in traditional societies, and would represent
good prescriptions for contemporary nation-building in Nigeria, without imputed
neo-colonial derogatory clauses. We
submit in agreement that the mythical and historical past cannot be lifted
wholesale in that traditional African government built its regimes and
institutions on oligarchic, feudalistic, monarchic and aristocratic foundations
that underscore total citizen exclusivity.
Whereas contemporary African politics desire openness, dialogue,
tenureship, transparency and leadership accountability as underpinning the new
global movement for democratic and inclusive, participatory governance.
Micheline Ravololonarisoa (2000), of London’s Agency for Cooperation
and Research in Development (ACORD) argues that neo-liberal democracy,
wholeheartedly embraced by so many NGOs in the South, including CHRRD,
constitutes a “political adjustment” strategy analogous to the economic
“structural adjustment” imperatives thrust on Africa in the past two
decades. “Political adjustment” therefore risks the same fate as
SAP unless it is closely monitored: the protection and bolstering of property
rights of the dominant classes. Ravololonarisoa
further cautions that “civil society is a counterpower that can mobilize to
ensure the accountability of the state to the people, but it cannot take over
the role of the state.” Granted,
this is where the holistic model of a comprehensive development framework can
theoretically provide a system of checks and balances.
The interventions of good governance capacity-building and civil society
strengthening must interlock, and it is at this fundamental nexus of local
government and CBO stakeholders that CHRRD, its Ward and LGA partners and its
funders are collaborating, attempting to initiate and sustain productive
dialogue through iterative, feedback-monitoring that will inculcate a culture of
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