Is Culture an Impediment to Technological Development?

By

Abdullah Musa

kigongabas@yahoo.com

A PR practitioner was selling an airline, trying to show the Hausa common folk that travel by plane can also be for them. So he said they can enter the plane ko da jaka, ko buhu, ko sakayau! He meant that they could enter either with the normal sophisticated travel bag, or with a sack, or even just plain without luggage. The common is not really concerned about aesthetics, but is more concerned about either function or cost effectiveness. If a travel bag costs a fortune why should he buy it since a used sack of paltry monetary value can also serve the purpose served by the bag?

Our interest today is not really in the manner our people travel around. We are interested in the efforts of some Governors to see that their cities meet up to the global standards. Of recent Governor Fashola of Lagos embarked on the beatification of his city state: a state that has continuously skyrocketing population, which paradoxically cannot be counted to the Governor of Lagos’s satisfaction by the Census Bureau.

Whatever may be the tussle over population, many observers believe that he is trying to do a good job in sanitizing a city that had the unenviable reputation of leaving human corpses to be flattened out by speeding cars and trucks. Here up North, another Governor is expanding the constricted streets, demolishing shanties and other illegal structures, and trying to bring back sanity to life of a city that had since lost all boundaries between it and the rural areas.

In English language they had a saying to denote filthiness by comparing the place in question with pigsty. The pigsty is stinking not because of its nature, but because of the nature of its occupant, the pig. And even with the pig, it is its habits in its habitat that make the place horrible. As such with us human beings, our cities are either hell or paradise, (if any is possible on earth) depending on our habits and our organizational capabilities.

One can imagine a Tuareg from the remotest corner of Niger joining a bus and coming into any city in Nigeria anew. Were such city well planned with all necessary amenities fit for decent living, he would find it extremely difficult to cope. Think of transferring him or her directly to cities where he or she is to join an electric train and so on. We can thus see that most of the human wastes in terms of excreta in our cities come from the homeless.

The system of almajiri ensures forced homelessness on the pupils and even in some cases the teachers. The result is a society where human waste not only litters the sides of the streets, but you may be forced to see the victims in the act. The collection of garbage free of charge had been for long taken by city dwellers as part of the dividends of democracy. Another Northern Governor is attempting to start a system where people will have to pay for the refuse evacuated. Let us hope it succeeds, so that negative forces do not turn it into campaign issue by promising to revert back to the old system, which they definitely know will fail; but since people are used to living like pigs, will they care if they have a new Dala, but this time of refuse?

The schooling system is more than a method of teaching you how to earn a living sitting down in an air-conditioned office, while the illiterate toils in the sun. It is supposed to inculcate into the student certain norms and values which will aid him or her to live up to the challenges of technological society. From the payment of school fees, little fines and levies, we get prepared to pay taxes, to respect the authority of the state. When are raised to beg for food; to beg for money to purchase OMO to wash; to beg for money to purchase slippers and so on, how does one come to agree that he has any obligation towards the State? Does he even know the State? In primary and secondary schools, they teach the national anthem and the pledge. It has no place in the Tsangaya system.

Muslims usually troop enmasse to Jumuat Masjids every Friday in order observe the forenoon prayer. As you are passing in a hurry, you see teenage girls entering fenced uncompleted buildings to sell food to watchmen or laborers working on the site, who will not however go to Masjid. This has been our (Hausa people) culture for ages. The girl who went through such system will hardly produce a better girl than herself. And from the educated Muslims’ point of view, hardly would you get good progeny from such girls when they marry. Who passed this sentence on the girls: their parents or authorities that shirked their responsibilities?

The politicians who want to transform their environments can hardly succeed without challenging our negative cultural orientations head-on. To have a rose-scented pigsty you have to change the orientation of the pig. You do not waste your time spraying the pig in its current condition with the most expensive perfume; for the next second you would see it groveling in the gutter!