Critical Analysis Of The Culture As A Solution Of Nigeria Development

Description

ABSTRACT

Culture, simply put, is the totality of a people’s way of life. Onigu Otite, quoting Edward Tylor, defines culture as, “that complex whole which includes the knowledge, beliefs, arts, morals, law, custom and any other capacities and habits acquired by man as a member of a society” (115). Also, Frank Aig-Imoukhuede, drawing from the Cultural Policy for Nigeria, says:  culture comprises the material, institutional, philosophical and creative aspects. The material aspect has to do with artefacts in its broadest form (namely: tools, clothing, food, medicine, utensils, housing).Institutional deals with political, social, legal and economic structures erected to help achieve material and spiritual objectives; while philosophical is concerned with ideas, beliefs and values, the creative concerns of a people’s literature (oral and written) as well as their visual and performing arts which are normally moulded by, as well as help to mould other aspect of culture.

Fortunately, the study of cultural issues was not new to Nigeria. A sound base of theoretical work and comparative research in related fields such as cultural tourism, culture and heritage planning, economic clusters, and the knowledge-based economy could be built upon. In reality, treating culture and creativity as economic engines for urban areas and applying Nigeria’s policy-oriented research approach to a field that today has deserved a very high position on cities’ agendas, proved to be a tough challenge. Nevertheless, the authors hope that the timing is appreciated, not only because academic work regarding the economic impact of culture is in full development, but also because empirical work is still extremely scarce and especially this knowledge proves to be essential for urban policy.

 CHAPTER ONE

1.0                                                              INTRODUCTION

1.1                                                 BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY

Culture counts. And today more than ever, it counts for cities,  the  powerhouses of the contemporary society. Culture is a full-fledged economic sector that – as any other – generates impacts on the urban environment, ranging from direct and indirect expenditure to employment generation.  Cultural industries are typically labour-intensive; their organisation model is rather the network interaction of micro and small producers than the supply- chain hierarchy of Fordist industries. Moreover, cultural production is highly contextual and idiosyncratic. For these reasons, city centres are privileged spaces for cultural production and consumption (Scott 2001, Heilbrun 1992).

Cities provide ideal workspace for artists and cultural managers; and the local economy comes to thrive of it, establishing a symbiotic relation with culture. Firstly, culture generates substantial “intangible” or non-pecuniary economic effects. It has a soft function of animation and enhancement of the quality of life, which is an increasingly important element of a city’s competitiveness. It stimulates human creativity, and the capacity to innovate. New symbolic meanings and values become inputs to innovative production concepts and processes. A city can market itself as an ideal location for people and firms,  and a preferred cultural destination for tourists; its unique, original cultural   mix can become a recognisable brand (New York’s loft living, Berlin’s underground art, the Bristol sound, etc.).

Furthermore, culture may contribute to a more balanced and sustainable urban development. Culture is part and parcel of urban revitalisation projects in degraded urban areas throughout the developed world. It provides a formidable opportunity for personal development and social interaction among weaker groups, and gives to “excluded” individuals a chance to their own start businesses or to catch up socially.

The relation between a community and its culture extends to concerns of safety and social harmony. In an age in which societies tend to become multi- cultural, identities and ways of life confront one another. In the multi-cultural city, culture can be a lever that stimulates pride, personal development, and self-fulfilment for minorities, and at the same time it can be a common language, a bridge between different groups. For this reason cultural development and planning are regarded as valuable strategies to accelerate processes of urban growth or regeneration. Cities invest in cultural facilities and events, and in the preservation of their historical heritage, to make their transition to a post-industrial economy based on advanced services, sustainable functional mixes, and a high quality of the urban environment.

This means that policymakers and elected politicians have to get the whole picture of the relevance of culture as an economic asset for the city, see where the problems are, and in which ways the synergies between cultural development and local economy can be activated and boosted. This is clearly not just information regarding the cultural sector of a city, which by the way receives surprisingly little attention by most municipal administrations throughout Nigeria. Clear knowledge of the effects of culture on other  functions of the city is also needed, from the economic field to social and cultural considerations.

Today we dispose of a substantial body of literature on the relationship between culture and the city. In particular, works like “The creative city” by C. Landry, “The cultural economy of cities” by A.J. Scott, and “The rise of creative class” by R. Florida, lay the foundations of a new way of thinking about the interrelationship between culture and place. Culture is seen in these works as a “way of doing” which is typical of a particular location, determining a comparative advantage in the production of specialised goods and services. This conceptualisation of culture as “system of social norms” informs the web of strategic relations (production or personal) which comes as part and parcel of modern forms of organisation of the economy. Florida (2000) argues that in the global economy the communication skills of the members of the “creative class” make the strength of the local milieu. Culture also restructures the governance of local growth processes: according to Landry (2001), the governance of a highly dynamic, complex, flexible and creative society also has to have creative and “lateral” qualities. Finally, Allen J. Scott (2001) shifts the discussion to culture as an urban “product”, or a set of industries that find their natural environment in cities, occupying a central role in regeneration processes, and generating value by feeding global functions dependent on image creation and valuation (tourism, infotainment, media, etc.).

Though rich and path-breaking, this debate is still decidedly “culture-centred”. The starting point is culture, and the way it gets embedded in advanced capitalistic forms. The main result is that cities are special places for this “encounter”. However, so far, little progress has been made in passing from abstract reflection to know-how that should orient the action of policy makers, both at local and Nigeria level. One main reason for this is the difficulty of defining and delimiting culture, given the complexity of the cultural production and consumption processes, and the heterogeneity of the players involved. In short, the Nigeria policy agenda is not yet ready to meet the challenges from a “stealth” area of urban development.

We wish to turn the question upside down and start from cities, their present positions and their chances of developing in a new, (more) sustainable way. The implications of the new “cultural economic” paradigm for urban development in terms of opportunities and threats have yet to be explored in deep, starting from this promising basis and integrating it with the traditional and most recent ideas in the field of urban economic planning.

1.2                                                    OBJECTIVES OF THE STUDY

This projects aims at understanding these interdependencies and at integrating them in a methodological framework that could be used by scientists and policymakers to assess the impacts of culture on the economic development of cities.

1.3                                                   PURPOSE OF THE STUDY

The main purpose of this study is to analyze ways in which culture can be seen as a solution to the development problem of Nigeria as a country. Specifically, the study is focused on the following issues.

1. To identify the impact of culture in Nigeria economy
2. To find out the tools for achieving a developed government via culture

1.4                                                       RESEARCH QUESTIONS

In particular we would like to address the following issues:

1. What is the “cultware” of a city, that is, how can a city be described in terms of its historical identity, cultural heritage and traditions, place distinctiveness, current cultural production activities and creative capacity?
2. What are the structure and the dynamics of the relations between the different components of the cultware?

• What kind of impacts and mutual influence can be expected from cultural activities and investments on the current and future social and economic development trends?

1. What are the inner dynamics of the cultural production sector? How does the cultware evolve and gets articulated in the fabric of the city?
2. What is the scope for policy and the available tools to steer the development of the cultware in the desired direction?
3. What is the contribution of a stimulating cultural environment to the location decisions of firms?

• What is the participation of citizens and tourists to art and culture?
• How are urban land values influenced by proximity with cultural attractions?

1. What is the status of artists in the city, and what is their level of interaction with corporations?
2. Are innovative businesses exchanging ideas with art organisations and creative talents? Where are cultural organisations located?
3. Are they segregated, unable to reach wide audiences?

• Do they receive enough attention, public investment and private sponsoring?

These questions are the key to understand the role of culture and enhance it, for the well-being of host communities. Unfortunately, it is very hard to provide sound answers, because they mainly regard qualitative information with strong contextual and historical character.

1.5                                                         SCOPE OF THE STUDY

The formulation of a consistent and effective urban policy agenda addressing culture requires more knowledge on the processes and impacts generated by culture in the city, and on the tools that may bring forward positive synergies between cultural development and other sectors of the urban arena.

Recent research on the cultural economic of cities has polarized between the analysis of prevailing trends and development models (Scott, 2000) and an almost frantic activity of data collection and elaboration on the other, reflecting an urge to re-assess the importance of cultural activities as growth sectors. Little attention has been paid, instead, to the analysis of urban impacts with the consequence that data collected in different cities are inconsistent or incomparable, and that the policy makers do not really know what use can be done of these data to justify development programs. In particular, raw cultural industry data can hardly be used to defend public or attract private investments, as more often than not they portray weak, fragile and fragmented sectors, while the heritage industry is often seen as “non rentable”, which – abiding strict economic principles – would play against conservation.

However, the integration of culture in urban studies promises to reveal interdependencies which can hardly be limited to the financial sphere, and can be grasped only by multi-criteria analysis.

1.6                                                LIMITATION OF THE PROBLEM

This study has problem when said that western adventures made efforts to undermine the cultural heritage of various peoples around the world through colonization, imperialism and now globalization. Cultural imperialism left the colonized in a state of cultural disorientation which is vulnerable to cultural invasion.

The most important far reaching problem of the study is the commercialization of culture. Production distribution and consumption of cultural goods and services have become commodities along with the essentials of life. Music, food, clothes, fashion, art, sports images, etc are now sold in the market, imported and exported.

Commercialization of culture has a disturbing problem on the people of Nigeria. For example, what was once an element of Nigeria’s cultural way of life has become a product, rather than something unique which they have made to suit their specific needs and circumstances. Nigerian markets are increasingly bombarded with new images, new music, new clothes and new values. The impact is that the familiar and the old artefacts are being discarded. The fact is that these will be lost simply because they are not valued by global markets. This undermining of the peoples existing values and cultures has a corrosive impact on the sense of who we are, what we want and what we respect. “The cumulative effect” in Akande’s (2000) words “is a crisis of cultural confidence, combined with economic uncertainty and crime which global integration often brings”.

In the area of religion, the problem of the study is not left out. For example, Hock-Tong (2001) observes that Islamic fundamentalism has in many respects served as a bulwark against modernity, that Muslims generally see the secular influence of western science and technology as inimical to traditional Islamic values. This was the reason most non-Muslim researchers tend to attribute the underdevelopment and under privileged state of Muslim women to Islamic tradition.

1.7                                                      WORKING DEFINITIONS

Thorough analytic research on the impacts of culture risks to be hampered by the lack (or complexity) of such concepts as “culture” and “art”. The very boundaries of the definitions of culture are shifting all the time, as are the architecture of symbols and meanings that underpins the structure of our society. The emergence of the “knowledge-economy” as the main production and value-generation paradigm of our age impinges at strongly cultural element

To master the very notion of culture is by no means easy. Definitional difficulties proved a major obstacle in efforts to streamline the information regarding the economic impacts of culture and propose a widely accepted assessment methodology. In its most general and philosophic terms, culture can be seen as a shared way of doing and understanding things, a system of values and an aesthetic language that binds a community and is formed by the peculiar historical development of that community. At the world conference of cultural politics in Mexico City in 1982, UNESCO described culture as concerning «… all the specific features, spiritual, material, intellectual or affective, that characterise a society or human group. Culture includes, besides art and literature, way of life, basic human rights, system of value, tradition and religions». Though in the global world the information – and therefore the means to understand reality – are converging more and more, cultures still make a difference, and in this sense we Nigerians can say that we are different from Americans, Italians claim they are different from Germans, and even Rotterdammers may vindicate their exclusive “know how” distinguishing them from the other Dutch.

 CHAPTER TWO

2.0                                                          LITERATURE REVIEW

2.1                                                    OVERVIEW OF THE STUDY

Culture is what characterises us as human beings and members of a community. However, this general, transcendental meaning of culture is itself the reflection of cultural activity, that is, the way in which artists and creative thinkers have read and described reality, providing  their fellow citizens  with  an “interpretation code”. Through human creative activity, culture is accumulated, experienced and rooted in the DNA of a community, not only as tangible items like monuments and art objects, but also as symbols, activities, landscapes or landmarks, traditions of public life and conviviality, festivals, rituals, food…