By Doglas Anele
In addition to all the above, the Executive Secretary has consolidated operations of NICO’s affiliate offices in the six geo-political zones of the country. Ayakoroma is also working tirelessly to strengthen collaboration between NICO and other corporate organisations, state governments, and international bodies.

One can confidently assert that if NICO, as the numero uno cultural parastatal of government, continues to march forward the way it is doing right now it would become a formidable catalyst of unprecedented cultural renaissance in Nigeria in a decade or so.

In that regard, I wish to celebrate staff of NICO, past and present, who contributed to its growth. Without their indefatigable efforts, sometimes under trying circumstances, the organisation would not have made any tangible impact on the cultural landscape of Nigeria.

However, like every human institution there are inadequacies in NICO, which implies that there is room for improvement especially in terms of upgrading facilities at the Training School, better students’ accommodation, in addition to enhanced incentives that can attract competent teaching staff.

It must be remarked that, given the low priority a typical Nigerian gives to matters concerning culture, it is important to reiterate how crucial cultural development is in the quest for national transformation.

As indicated earlier,culture is a powerful barometer for measuring self-identity. Furthermore, development in all its ramifications – material, intellectual, moral, spiritual – is mediated through culture.

This means that man is not just the creator of culture; he is also the creation of culture.Now, in addition to the deleterious effects of colonisation on indigenous cultures of Nigeria, the parlous state of the country’s economy in recent years and corruption have drastically reduced government’s investment in the culture industry.

That said,the federal and state governments are duty-bound to support NICO in order to realise the lofty objectives formulatedin the Cultural Policy of 1988. The centrality of language in all this cannot be overemphasised.

From our previous discussion, our indigenous languages might be extinct in the next few decades unless creative measures are taken to prevent that from happening. Based on the indigenous language programme mentioned earlier, it is not an exaggeration to say thatNICO is at the forefront in the effort to promote mother-tongues across the country.

However, I recommend that the Institute should take its endeavour in this regard to the next level by promoting the idea of using indigenous languages as the media of instruction in our educational institutions. Specifically, the Institute can device a program to catalyse the following idea: each of the six geo-political zones in the country should establish schools where, apart from the study of English, the language of instruction in all subjects should be the dominant language spoken in that zone.

Obviously, there are formidable difficulties in actualising our suggestion – financial, logistic and lack of political will on the part of government. But consider this: virtually all technologically advanced countries in the world developed their technologies in their respective languages – Germany in German, Britain and America in English, France in French, Russia in Russian, and Japan in Japanese.

The major reason for this situation, according to Prof. Nnabuenyi Ugonna, is that it is natural to think more creatively in one’s mother-tongue than in a second language. Most ignorant Nigerians think that the pure and applied sciences, including mathematics, cannot be taught using indigenous languages as the media of instruction.

But researches carried out by Prof. B. A. Fafunwa and others on the pedagogic potentials of selected local languages have debunked that notion. If the sciences and engineering can be taught in German, Japaneseand Chinese, for instance, then there is no insurmountable reason why the same subjects cannot be taught in local languages.

What is needed most is a leadership that has the will to make the necessary investment towards actualising the ideal of education in our indigenous languages. The tremendous technological and psychological benefits that will be derived from successful implementation of such a programme are incalculable.

Bringing to public awareness the home-grown technological achievements of our technologists and scientists through the media of local languages will blow to smithereens the fallacy that Black peoples of Sub-Saharan Africa did not contribute anything, technology-wise, to the development of human civilisation.

In this connection, NICO can play a leading role in projecting the scientific and technological achievements of autochthonous Nigerian peoples to a wider audience. From another perspective NICO can, through its enlightenment programmes, discourage the tendency to over-romanticise our cultural heritage.

Certainly, like cultures in other parts of the world, indigenous Nigerian cultures contain the good, the bad, and the horrible. Hence NICO should not focus exclusively on the positive aspects of our local cultures; it should also continuously shine critical spotlight on the negative aspects which have survived up till now with a view to eradicating them.

Harmful practices such as female genital mutilation, trial-by-ordeal, dehumanising widowhood rites, expensive funeral ceremonies, unfair inheritance customs that discriminate against female children and so on are anachronistic; NICO should be vigorously campaigning for an end to these practices. The question of peaceful co-existence among adherents of different religions is high in the agenda of NICO.

We believe that the Institute should organise, especially at the primary and secondary school levels, programmes that stress religious tolerance and social harmony as indispensable ingredients in the arduous enterprise of nation-building.

Sporadic eruption of religious violence in certain parts of the countrymeans that NICO still has a lot of work to do to make Nigerians live-and-let-live. All said and done, there is no doubt that with wise leadership, NICO will continuously grow from strength to strength in years to come.

Thus, political leaders, corporate organisations, and indeed the generality of Nigerians, should give NICO all the necessary support it needs to make Nigeria the cultural Mecca of Black people across the world.
CONCLUDED.