Adopting proactive and effective development strategy has been a primary headache of most developing countries. Myriad policies have ceaselessly been churned out, geared towards identifying and solving developmental problems in areas of poverty, women empowerment, youth development, education, healthcare, and community development yet each of them have failed to solve the problem of underdevelopment. In the political economy of underdeveloped and developing countries, the challenges remain glaringly the same: rural and urban poverty, rural-urban migration, feminization of poverty. This is largely due to lack of, or poor, job skills for self-employment, as well as poor access to education and healthcare.
Development strategists and policy makers while claiming to have changed the model of development efforts from top-bottom to bottom-top approach have continued to take the same macro approach: policy prescriptions dished out without taking cognizance of individual country’s cultural environmental peculiarities. For instance, here in Nigeria, a federated country of multi-cultural and multi-ethnic nationalities each characteristically distinct in its own social orientations and organization, the pattern is no different. Social development policies have usually been crafted and implemented without regard to alternative routes to development that acknowledge these socio-environmental peculiarities. So much so that some of these have been neglected, ignored or totally relegated to near-irrelevance as effective tools for national development.
One of such institutions that could be become a ready-made tool to when properly maximized to engender social and community development in Igboland is the age grade institution. In historical times, age-grades served as organizers of the village labor force, initiators of laws, and the law enforcement agency. Of course, the institution of age-groups predates town unions, which is a more recent phenomenon that developed as kinship social network organizations for urban migrants in the wake of urbanization in colonial times. Regrettably, the age grade system which is more widespread, original, culturally-integrated, and grassroots-oriented has been relegated to the background.
Yet, age-grades, even in this modern age, still constitute the bulk of the government of most communities. For, they continue to perform community development roles with functions that include social discipline, construction of roads, provision of supply, rebuilding of markets, health centers, and schools but without the official government recognition, consideration, or backing for social policy purposes. Nor have they ever been officially acknowledged, recognized, or mobilized for partnership for developmental purposes.
It has, therefore, become critically imperative for states in Igboland and Eastern Nigeria, particularly the emergent Soludo Administration in Anambra, to embark on actions aimed at mobilizing the forces of age grade associations for social policy and community development. With focus on education, healthcare, poverty alleviation, job creation, and the environment, great impact could be made on problems affecting women, children, the aged, and the less privileged in our society.
As the Japanese, the Koreans and the Asian Tigers, plus the Chinese, have effectively utilized their ant-like ‘group discipline’, their culturally-unique formula, as their comparative advantage in building the corporate environment model for development; and the Germans their apprenticeship system, so can we deploy our own unique age grade institution to our comparative advantage in fashioning out our own model. And, as the Harvard Business School has formally adopted the famous Igbo apprenticeship scheme as a course in their new Entrepreneurship Studies program, so should we, ourselves, adopt our very own indigenous age grades institution into our development strategy.
Governments and Governor Soludo, must, therefore, complementary to town unions, also recognize our age-grades; utilizing this institution long regarded in Igboland as both initiators and implementers of law and policy; and mobilizing them for appropriate community development projects and activities in our governance system.
Nkú di na mba na-eghelu mba nni!
Written by OLISA MOMALIFE
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