Leadership (Abuja)
Utim Benjamin
17 March 2008
opinion
Abuja — The fact that value conflicts are embedded with issues that arise on account of unhealthy distinction, restriction, exclusion, and preferences is not a controversial perspective, but the inability of members of the society to manage the challenges posed by the tendencies exhibited by some advocates of those discriminatory values is the issue in contention. The chances of deepening the divide between advocates of a particular value increases because of certain factors.
First, the lack of proper and adequate exposure to knowledge regarding the practices that encapsulate such values. This is one of the key hurdles that obscures the proper contextualisation for understanding the value itself. It is obvious that life cannot be uniform for everything, as the diversity itself makes nature unique and an object for fancy. But half knowledge about certain value practices weave a hail of wrong information - some of which is deliberately disseminated to ridicule the value practices or on the contrary to popularise its preference and give a prejudicial perception about it to people who don't know much about the value. This kind of information dissemination brings about a psychological defensive projection and attribution error characterisation from the value's adherents, who become unreasonably conservative in regard to issues affecting it. This attitude is inimical to descent and ethnic based discriminatory value transformation and abounds in the society. The attitude is not only exhibited by individuals but it is sometimes deliberately fueled through political governmental propaganda championed to score political points or favor from the international community or donor agencies.
When anthropological methods of inquiring after this value practices fails to be unbiased in their presentation because of the inherent values of the anthropologist himself, the consequences of appreciating the key clues and cue for engineering value conflict transformation about the value in order to engender ethical reasoning becomes flawed and difficult. This is the biggest tragedy afflicting efforts at value conflict transformation in societies throughout the modern world today.
Closely aligned to the above point of 'lack of proper exposure to such value conflict' is the 'lack of sufficient and quality value conflict experts that are properly domesticated in the understanding of the patterns of appreciating the perspectives that make such a value special to its adherents'. There are sundry beliefs and cultures in practice in the world today, and most are facing adaptive challenges. The challenges posed by the various controversies created by value practices by far dwarfs the number of genuine local value conflict experts who could have assisted in refining their understanding for educating the wider society on options for transforming them. The lacuna created by this handicap of local value conflict experts creates an open path for all sorts of unguided negative manipulations of controversies about certain values in our society. In the course of time, this leads to the evolving of sectarian notions and patterns that are inherently incompatible with societal harmonious co-existence. The challenges raised by this value patterns create a wider front for instigating violent conflicts by their manipulators, thus increasing the conflict's intractability and making more complex the efforts at reformation and Value Conflict Transformation.
In Nigeria today, we are radically handicapped when it comes to designing value conflict transformation monitoring framework. The various institutions charged with responsibility for mapping and designing intervening strategies majorly focus on conflict resolution and neglect value conflict transformation. Worst still, for you to select and deploy some one on a value conflict study exercise, that individual must have an unalloyed pedigree in the contemporary value-knowledge concerning the ways of life of the people in the area beyond the simple academic historical knowledge of them; and if that knowledge is not there, then he must be compelled to become domiciled among them for as long as it will take to appreciate the proper context of the value and how it becomes manipulated to create the issue that generate the violence of discrimination.
The world in most cases is unable to assist the United Nations' cause of efficiently fighting discrimination on the basis of ethnicity because of an absence of a proper loop from which to derive refined understanding of domestic value conflicts perspectives. Most United Nations' field staff are only able to enroll local persons without the key domestic value conflict knowledge about the appropriate value conflict transformation interventions that are needful; and they are also unable to do much to generate knowledge that is unbiased about a particular value conflict for the purposes of initiating appropriate transformation about it. This increases in the long term the overall cost of peace keeping and peace making project deployments and creates delays for securing an atmosphere for fostering value confl ict transformation even when there is a cease fire because, most eligible persons formerly domiciled in the vicinity and who could have assisted with expert information for enhancing the understanding of the issues from an unbiased perspective might have been displaced by the ensuing violence.
Another factor that fuels value conflict from an ethnic and/or descent basis is the challenges poised by closed communities or cluster ethnic settlement in 'diaspora': There are always two sides to every coin. This perspective applies well to the factor of cluster ethnic communities as citadels for reinforcing value conservatism and through such restrictive patterns increasing xenophobia, ethnicity and racism amongst communities.
This point is well illustrated in a book titled Communal Conflict and Practical Value Conflict Transformation Exercises for Peace Education Training and Practice by Utim. B.T. (2007; 50-53). The book addresses Value Conflict Transformation views about peace as a continuously evolving and developing quality of relationship.
On the other hand however, the other side of the coin will argue that, cluster-ethnic settlements in migrant territory reinforces ethnic identity and integration for purposes of promoting cultural heritage by increasing progressive solidarity among migrating members of an ethnic group in 'diaspora'.
The last but not the least of factors that are indirectly contributing to value conflict as violence and discrimination on the basis of ethnicity and descent is poor political will for implementing national intervention strategies against discriminatory values. Political will is encouraged by the United Nations as a major factor for eradicating racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance at the national, regional and international levels. When we look at individual countries annual budgets, particularly in Africa, one alarming recurring decimal that features prominently is the absence of any significant special budgetary allocation for peace making during times of civil calm in a country. Even were a few of such allocations are made, we notice they are just enough to sponsor a handful of workshops that may not be able to sustain immediate follow-ups, while the rest allocation is spent on servicing the recurrent expenditure for managing the institution's human and physical infrastructures.
The rampage in the Niger-Delta area of Nigeria is also a consequence of this deficient budgeting that does not enable relevant NGOs that are into genuine peace program development to sustain follow-ups on the training and rehabilitation commitments made to assist people being encouraged to toe the path of non-violence. We have an ongoing trend of mass mis-allocation of resources to all sorts of agencies whose pedigrees dwell on plagiarising and woeful duplication of peace initiatives that appear not to hold water. The result is the intractability of the conflict which is predicated on economic and environmental values. The Nigerian government is still passing yet another annual budget that is gravely soiled with the above accusations and which under-pins the legitimacy of the above accusations as no dime has been allocated for civil society portfolio interests.
Utim Benjamin is the national co-ordinator of The Humanity Knights Network, an NGO pioneering value conflict transformation for fighting discrimination based in Abuja.
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