Getting the balance right

The headline this week- Federal Government to phase out mud houses- is as audacious as the news maker, if not preposterous that the Minister of Science and Technology, Dr. Ogbonnaya Onu fathomed the idea of phasing out mud houses when our country is in a deficit of over twenty million houses annually.

Wait a minute. I can sense my reader’s utter surprise at the audacity and preposterousness of the plan, imagining how the jaws drop at the senseless of it.

I can make sense of the conditions of those individuals who, having woken up from the card boxes of homes etched against the sky of the suburbia, stand at the newspapers stand and gape at the headline.

I don’t have to imagine the manner of finger-pointing, swear words that preface every SHEGE, the ripping into the hearts of those they accuse of insensitivity, lacking compassion and the unwillingness to address the real problems confronting the poor of our country- unemployment, homelessness, hunger, poverty, kidnapping, herdsmen attacks and anarchy. Literarily.

There is a sense of truth to be made out of the finger-pointing, and, to some extent, out of those swear words which seem to draw attention to the hollowness of a few public policies, the banality of seeking new battlegrounds in none conflicted areas and searching out trails to absent darkness, searching the pieces of non-existent puzzles, or discerning pieces one cannot make sense of, that one cannot fit into puzzles.

The problem, here, isn’t about how sense can be made of manufactured problems, is the way our public servants create new battlegrounds, problems and conflicts then seek to contain the violent eruption that emerges with the same thinking, the same manner the battlegrounds of conflict were created in the first place.

Accordingly, we need to ask: why phase out mud houses that aren’t threats to the public or to their occupiers? Why phase them out when our country is struggling to meet its national housing needs?

These questions not only help us to appreciate the Honourable Minister’s inchoate idea, but they also help us to understand why a Minister of his pedigree needs to fix what is not broken, if we don’t have the ready answers.

There is, and has been so for more than a year now, an intense of despair of those who cannot find a place to sleep, a place to live in, a place they can organize their lives around, and a place to call home.

The governing party’s manifesto, called, ‘an honest contract with Nigeria’, promised to “establish a National Housing Policy in cooperation with state governments with a target of raising enough finance to build up to a million New Year over the next decade”. This is the first of the many promises of the governing party.

There is this particular promise that seeks to “develop new urban planning schemes through through the local authority [both] in existing cities and new model towns to meet urban needs” and that other which “creates an obligation on private housing developers to build or contribute financially to the building of social housing projects as part of the planning approval process”.

Fine ideas. Brilliant plans, framed only for oppositional encounters, perhaps. The reality of oppositional encounters is ever different from the reality of governing encounters.

The manifesto, which yesterday made voters to trip for what was possible when impossibility was a stark reality, readily becomes an hourglass which measures the distance between expectation and outcome, promise and action.

The possible is real only when the governing party applies itself to its national housing policies, for example, learn to implement them by breaking the ground and turning the stone. However, when it neglects to do all of this, reality reveals that the distance between expectation and outcome, promise and action is no more than the length of a broom stick standing by itself.

In summary, for a political party to give airs to itself in the theatre of opposition politics is to offer cheap talk, render the tittle and tattle of the beer parlor to secure the popular support of the electorate. The reality of oppositional politics often masks outcome when nobody questions how promises can be fulfilled.

Here, the tendency is that a governing party that fails to apply itself to governance uses the hammer on any problem, as if it were a nail and ends up destroying what already exists as the relic of the past, as an affront on a poorly conceived modernity.

Truly I don’t see how mud houses have become a national problem deserving ministerial attention, or the off-the-cuff ministerial declaration.

Talk about the triumphalism of those who forget, refuse to be humbled by the “mud houses” of their small beginnings.

The phasing out of mud houses deals with a poorly conceived modernity as much as it deals with the arrogance of our elites, who live in denial, who reject the past and its relics, who are not proud of their past, the glory of small beginning, the inheritances, heritages and legacies passed down in time, and who surrender to ubiquitous modernity by looking for so-called redemption outside the traditional reality they were born into, and grew from.

It is important to stress here that only a true understanding of the past can help wheedle the elites out of the vision and reality of the plastic age, wean them off “the widespread addiction to cement and tin roofs”, to borrow from Julius Nyerere, and press them into appreciating the past; from being fearsome avant-garde of the plastic age to becoming promoters of our traditional human settlements- the mud house as a way of life.

Nyerere calls this addiction “a kind of mental paralysis”. I couldn’t agree more.

Perhaps I misconstrue what the newspapers say the Honourable Minister said, taken the news report of the Federal Government developing a draft action for the phasing out mud houses across the country out of context.

Let us hear the Honourable Minister. “It is the desire of this government to give Nigerians decent living conditions. That’s why we are charging the NBRRI – Nigerian Building and Road Research Institute- to go into research that would enhance employment opportunities; decent houses and decent lives for Nigerians. The phasing out of mud houses might not be achieved immediately but it an ideal thing to do”.

If the phasing out of mud houses is about research, Dr. Ogbonnaya Onu makes the wrong case, attempts to mask the poverty of policy with the veneer of research “that would enhance employment opportunities”. How? He doesn’t tell us.

Assuming that phasing out mud houses is about research into contemporary and modern building techniques, his proposed draft action merely seeks to destroy rather than enhance traditional building methods and techniques.

If truly the Honourable Minister was sincere about research, he would have talked up strategies that balance tradition and modernity, without necessarily killing off one for the other- tradition for modernity.

Getting the balance right is important for societies that allow culture to form the core of their social and cultural realities, that promote tradition as a way of life.

This can only be possible where there is an appreciable understanding of those historical experiences that shape research and reinforce time as the reconciler of traditional and modern epochs. The reality that tradition and modernity can exist side-by-side requires social and cultural reorientation, if not transformation.

Historical experiences abound and they should shape our mindset, refocus our effort towards transforming aspects of our cultural and traditional way of life without distorting the core. All we need do is to improve our understanding of history and of our indigenous knowledge in building and architecture and connect them to contemporary scientific and technological excavations. A Ministerial Declaration that isn’t steeped in history, shaped by learning is unhelpful in this regard.

There is nothing ideal about phasing out a way of life when we can graft this way of life into modern reality to improve it. Take the local bean tree as one example. Fruit pods of this tree can be researched into, developed as water proof coating for the walls of mud houses.

There is also the possibility of borrowing from such places as India where cow dungs are used to strengthen bricks and soil pastes. Rather than phase out mud houses to make our villages and hamlets concrete jungles, we can borrow practices- improve and evolve them into something time will eventually name as our gift to the world.

Was it not how the Indian stupa evolved into the pagoda of the Chinese, Koreans and Japanese?

Dr. Ogbonnaya Onu is in a better position to help this government develop housing and human settlement strategies, “promote development in accordance with indigenous practices and local conditions. Instead he proposes an inchoate idea that comes to no good.