The National Institute for Cultural Orientation (NICO) is advocating for a policy that will make it mandatory for a list of Nigerian leaders to receive training on the country’s national culture.
NICO listed the targeted leaders as lawmakers, policy makers and diplomats, who will undertake cultural training and orientation.
The Executive Secretary/CEO of NICO, Otunba Biodun Ajiboye made this known while making a presentation at the 2024 Management Retreat of the Federal Ministry of Art, Culture and the Creative Economy and its agencies in Abuja.
According to a statement issued Thursday by Caleb Nor, his Media Assistant, the NICO Boss said, in pursuance of its statutory mandate, his agency is ready to ensure that all lawmakers and policy makers in the country participate in its Mandatory Cultural Orientational Retreat where they can be better equipped with cultural understanding that will enhance their job.
His words: “A man who does not understand the culture of a people cannot make laws and policies for them. Our lawmakers and policy makers have to understand that there is the need to appreciate our culture very well before they can make good laws and policies for the people”.
“If customs and traditions are considered to be an important part of law, then we must understand that law is one of the biggest pillars upon which governance, politics and government rests. This means that culture has a very great role to play in policy making and lawmaking”.
“We realized very late that culture should have been made part of our policy process. We made that mistake because we were people that were colonized and if you take the people’s culture from them, they will die naturally with time”.
Further stressing the need to redefine the importance of culture to a point where it features in our day to day lives, the NICO Boss said a considerable part of his job at NICO is to see how best to provide this cultural orientation to policy makers and the citizenry in general.
“We have a responsibility to redefine culture and make it useful to ourselves and to the government. Culture is an antedote to societal decadence and if we are able to re-evaluate and re-enact our cultural values, we will reduce the many societal ills we are currently facing as a nation,” he said.
Ajiboye also called the attention of all heads of agencies under the Art, Culture and the Creative Economy Ministry to what he described as “the crucial responsibility to redefine, redirect and rewrite the essentialities of culture, stating that “If the people don’t understand the proper meaning of culture, they will continue to refer to us as mere dancers”.
