The National Institute for Cultural Orientation (NICO) has advocated for a policy that will make it mandatory for lawmakers, policymakers, and diplomats to undertake cultural training and orientation.
The Executive Secretary and Chief Executive Officer of NICO, Otunba Biodun Ajiboye, made the call while presenting at the 2024 Management Retreat of the Federal Ministry of Art, Culture, and the Creative Economy and its agencies in Abuja.
According to him, NICO, in pursuance of its statutory mandate, is ready to ensure that all lawmakers and policymakers in the country participate in its mandatory Cultural Orientation Retreat, where they could be better equipped with cultural understanding that would enhance their jobs.
Ajiboye said: “A man who does not understand the culture of a people cannot make laws and policies for them. Our lawmakers and policymakers have to understand that there is a need to appreciate our culture very well before they can make good laws and policies for the people.
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“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 rest. This means that culture has a very great role to play in policymaking 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 who were colonized, and if you take the people’s culture from them, they will die naturally with time.”
The Media Assistant to the Executive Secretary, Caleb Nor, in a statement on Thursday, noted that the NICO Boss further stressed the need to redefine the importance of culture to a point where it features in the day-to-day lives of the citizens.
He added that a considerable part of his job at NICO is to see how best to provide this cultural orientation to policymakers 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 antidote 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.”
Ajiboye, therefore, called the attention of all heads of agencies under the Art, Culture, and the Creative Economy ministry to 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.”
