Except those who occupy positions of advantage, every other person living in Nigeria must have, in one way or the other, been passing through a harrowing experience occasioned by the pervasive economic downturn in the country. Primarily, the removal of fuel subsidy and the new foreign exchange market format that has drastically devalued the naira against the dollar are the major policy thrusts that brought the nation’s economy to its knees in recent times.
The common man is no longer able to afford the three-square meals in a day while the middleclass people watch their bank accounts deplete faster than usual. Income remains either constant or reduced, but rents, school fees, transport fares, prices of food and other household items, even the already dangerously high unemployment rate, are soaring.
The hard times should offer us the opportunity to interrogate some of the practices that create deep holes in our pockets and render us poorer than ever before. In the first place, time has come for us as hamlets, clans, and communities to review our processes of socialization as they concern burials and marriages. It has been noticed that these two ceremonies consume a large chunk of our incomes, especially in Igbo land.
Back in the old days, no one cooked in the family of the deceased. Relatives and sympathizers brought food to the bereaved as long as the funeral lasted. Although the family was expected to perform some customary rites, one of which was the presentation of items to the various kindreds of the deceased, both paternal and maternal, as a way to inform them of the demise of one of them, it was merely tokenish.
Before mortuaries turned into big business, people buried their loved ones within two days or less. The funeral ceremony took place later if the status of the deceased required it. Today, everything has changed. Burials are no longer solemn events but jamborees where the bereaved family is expected to feed the entire kindred for as long as the corpse remains in the mortuary. They are compelled to provide every item in a bloated list handed over to them by various groups before they lower their lost ones into the grave. Inside the list is at least a cow and other motley four-legged animals that are lined up for slaughter over one ritual or the other.
Burials have become big projects and people compete among themselves in lavish ceremonies. For the reason that food and wine flow freely at burials, a good number of people have formed the habit of converging where it is happening just as vultures would hover around carcass. Hence, the uncanny expression, ozu a ga agba nmai, meaning that there will be much wine at this burial. In order to meet up, the family is forced to sell land or borrow. Resources that would have been used to maintain the living are squandered in an attempt to give the dead “a befitting burial”. The cycle of poverty continues.
Next in the lineup of agents of our impoverishment is a series of demands placed before men who desire to marry. Our customs appear to be insensitive to the plight of overgrown bachelors held down by sky-high bride prices and expensive but compulsory items that they must present to their in-laws before taking their brides home. Many men have remained unmarried because they cannot afford to pay for, as well as maintain a wife.
In some cases, the very religious persons suspect them as being hampered from marrying the numerous damsels by their spirit wives. On a candid note, we have unwittingly been selling our girl children by placing a high and compulsory price on them. The element of compulsion is where the problem lies. A wealthy person should feel free to splash his wealth on his in-laws, but for a community to expect a less fortunate person to do the same thing is an overkill. A simple readjustment in this area can make things easy for this class of young men. A newspaper story, recently, had a report that men have resorted to making comparisons of prices in various locations and communities to decide on where to direct their search for partners.
In the civilized world, neither men nor women pay bride price or dowry as a condition to marry. They simply get wedded and begin lives as husband and wife after a modest ceremony. What, if we do it that way? Many times we fail to understand the difference between dowry and bride price. The dowry is money paid to the groom by the family of the bride, as a take-off grant for the new family and it is the culture of the Indians and other Asian descendants. The reason behind it is that the man had come to relieve the family of the burden of caring for one of their daughters and so deserves to be helped initially. Bride price, on the other hand, is paid by the groom to the bride’s family. We must agree that what has a price tag is a commodity for the market. Let us begin from now to stop debasing womanhood when we place a price on our daughters.
We must also see it as a way to curtail the anxieties of men in this critical economic situation. Protests and social media tantrums cannot perform any magic to rescue our sinking economy. The government and the citizens should learn to abandon profligacy and embrace frugality. As the adage goes, when the soup is depleted, the size of the ball of fufu reduces. The other way to see it is that we should cut our coat according to the cloth available.
To help the situation, churches, as social institutions, should engage in more productive ventures such as agriculture and industry than in education and medicals. They should also make rules and regulations that would minimize the cost of marriages and burials among the faithful.
Our government should as a matter of urgency curtail its spending and borrowing patterns. It should stop listening to international monetary organisations like the IMF and World Bank whose interest seem to be mainly to profit Western countries and keep developing nations perpetually tied to their apron strings economically.
Past administrations had introduced cost-cutting measures in their tenures. Gen. Olusegun Obasanjo, as military head of state, was popular for his policy of low profile when the highest vehicle used in all government agencies and departments was a made-in-Nigeria Peugeot. Shehu Shagari’s civilian administration came up with austerity measures, while the Buhari-Idiagbon government went for essential commodities, shunning non-essential ones. Ibrahim Babangida, as a military president, introduced its Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) and threw the issue of IMF loan open for public debate even as a military government.
Beyond the palliatives of rice, Nigerians are eager to know the plans of the present administration to, meaningfully, make life easier for them.
Dr. Odu can be reached through dirimrich2018@gmail.com or SMS 07016722929