By Charles Kumolu

Former Chairperson of Lagos State Council for Arts and Founder, Five Cowries Arts Foundation, Mrs Polly Alakija, in this interview, talks about how she is using abstract platforms to ensure creativity in Nigeria’s education system. She also speaks on how culture could be used to sustain climate change conversation in the country.

What are the things you want to achieve with Five Cowries Arts Foundation?

We registered the NGO 18 months ago but it is a continuation of the works I have done in the last 30 years in that space.

I just realised I needed to give the things I did in that space a structure so that we can bring more partners on board and scale-up. It is all about trying to empower our children and young people through creativity.

It is not necessarily about creating an artist. It is about getting young people to be creative. We believe that creativity is an effective tool in the 21 century on an individual level, community level, family level, and workplace among others. People just need to be creative. For instance, in our schools, we have a lot of issues with creativity. We have a high illiteracy rate.

I hear people say that they employ university graduates who are always retrained. I spoke to a CEO recently who said he was interviewing people with MBA and PhD and they didn’t know how to ask questions.

He wondered how they would be effective if employed. It shows that we have huge issues. Young people are not taught how to have their own opinion. The issue is how do we make a change? That is what we are trying to achieve and we are doing that through creativity.

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Programmes for communities

People need to understand things to be able to be creative. We focus on developing the capacity of our educators, not teachers.

The reason, I said educators, is that we are not only working in schools but also in communities. We are developing programmes for communities of young people. The idea is that anybody that is a community leader or educator, we give the person basic creative skills.

It is about building their capacities so that they can have confidence in themselves. If the person does not have that confidence, he or she may not know how to ask questions and impact on young people. We focus on winning the teachers and we are big on that.

We talk to a lot of people who support education. If we don’t win the teachers, we can’t win the classroom. You can have an effective classroom under a tree if the teacher is inspired, committed and enthusiastic.

As much as possible, we do a lot of programmes with artists and educators locally and internationally. We try to raise funds so that we can get materials for the schools. The abstract platforms we create win the teachers and make kids creative.

How do you select the schools and students?

It depends on the particular project we are working on. We have various delivery partners. One of them is Teach for Nigeria. They have their teachers in schools. We work with them and wherever their schools are, we go there.

They are in Ogun State. We have started many programmes with the Lagos State government. We have an awesome relationship. We worked with Obalende Local Government Area, LGA. A couple of groups have approached us to develop their programmes and work with their communities.

We would love to work with every government school but we do not have the capacity. We realise that not everything about the education system is bad. That is why we are supporting teachers to move to a more creative and impactful way of teaching. We keep an eye always on the curriculum. The goal is not to interfere with the curriculum but to support it.

For example, we have been able to support the learning of mathematics by using art skills to get kids to concentrate. If the students are having a problem with attention in mathematics, a drawing task that is connected with the mathematical problem will make them concentrate.

Those are the kinds of creative skills we give to our teachers. We talk about the four Cs which are Creativity, Collaboration, Communication, and Critical thinking. We talk about key issues that we feel are relevant to their lives like water.

We get kids to talk about their relationship with water. In doing that, the kids and teachers understand the importance of the water they drink and use for bathing. We just want them to know how to make their lives safer through the water.

All these young people that we are in contact with, we want them to know that they can make a difference. We have key projects like My Story of Water, My Story of Energy and My Story of Balance. Storytelling in an engaging way we are using to make these kids and teachers understand creativity.

In the course of doing these, have you discovered any alarming deficiencies about teachers and students?

There are so many. The major issue is massive underinvestment in the education system. What does the education budget look like? It is pathetic? Having more than 150 students in a class with one teacher leads nobody anywhere.

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Where are you going with that? Some do not even have pencils. Underinvestment is a very critical issue. The curriculum is also an issue. Until you invest, you are not going to get results.

The investment will lead to investing in a better consultancy, who would now point out the deficiencies like having a class of 150 students with one teacher. We need to invest in our students and schools. If I go knocking on the doors of policymakers that we need systemic change in education, it may not yield needed result but through the abstract platforms we create, they get involved in the conversation.

You were a keynote speaker at an arts event that focused on climate change recently. What was it about?

It was not organised by my foundation. It was put together by Ben Enwonwu Foundation. When he mentioned the title to me, I found it interesting because if he had conceived it a few years back with the same title, there was no way the conversation would have held.

The title he chose is: Using Arts for Environmental Sustainability. I taught replacing arts with culture in the title was appropriate. There are differences between arts and culture.

In my role as then Chairperson of Lagos State Council for Arts and Culture, I got the state included in a platform called World City Culture Forum. It is a forum of 38 cities and it is a gathering of cities with economic and political influence.

They are key cities like Moscow, Lagos, Paris, New York, Shanghai and Soul among others. They were selected because they were seen to be able to wield influence on policy and influence other cities.

I got Lagos to be included in that platform. Cultural leaders of the cities come together to exchange notes, collaborate, look at what the global issues are and help develop policy statements for our leaders.

They help them embed the issues into relevant ministries and departments in the cities. The environment and climate change are top issues they look at. It is an acknowledgement that we can be more effective at the community level.

City leadership is key to making systemic change in how we behave and who we are. Climate change is just a big issue that requires the participation of city leadership.

Use culture 

I am just happy that we have a platform now to discuss climate change at a high level. One of the speakers was a professor of Environmental Law at the University of Lagos, UNILAG.

She told me a department was created to look at climate change in UNILAG and they gathered data on what is happening including rising water level. They did all the research and had never thought of how to unpack what they gathered to make an impact.

I told her that they could use culture to make an impact. I told her that all they needed to do is to get their data and talk to our cultural leaders and get them to embed the climate change issues into what they are doing.

Imagine if Nollywood is embedding climate change issues into what they are doping. All our creative people need to embed this into what they are doing. The fashion industry seems to be the biggest culprit in terms of emission. The fashion industry needs to wake up to that.

Fashion also includes architecture. Look at how we build our houses to be dependent on generators. Look at our dependency on plastics. She spoke and raised questions for the creative industry to start the conversation on climate change.

The time is right to use culture in fighting climate change. The title of the event was arts but the issue is bigger than the arts.

We had the event at Alliance Francaise. It focused on using arts to look at environmental sustainability. We looked at issues around climate change. I was part of the event and I talked about the role of arts education in that space.

What is interesting to me about the event is that the issues about climate change had been an unspoken story. Interestingly, people are now willing to talk about it at a high level.

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Since arts and culture go together, why did you say culture would make more impact on climate change than arts?

They go together everywhere but they are two different things like a horse and a carriage, a man and a wife. If I ask someone on the street what art means, he may not know.

How do you define what arts are? It is quite difficult. I can get there but it is not an easy thing. It is more esoteric. What is culture? Everyone knows what culture is. It is who we are and how we live.

Our culture is our custom. Culture is at the heart of communities and we know and accept that. Arts can be easily dismissed but you can’t dismiss culture. I would say that our culture manifests through the arts.

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