INTRODUCTION:
The family unit is the nucleus of the society and a primary agent of socialization and development. If this is true, it therefore goes without argument that a well-planned family is the base for a well-planned development, sustainable growth and moral capital/richness of any society.
This is why family planning has been globally accepted and promoted as an indispensable way to check rapid population momentum in order to sustain human lives and the environment, now and for the future.
Family planning entails all the necessary pre-marital and marital knowledge and responsibilities needed to achieve well-planned individual families with limited members whose maintenance and upkeep is possible with limited available resources and tools.
Africa’s Cultural Dilemma:
Apart from the governments and policy makers coming up with better workable policies that will educate, motivate and promote behavioural changes needed to mitigate unplanned births, there is a dire need for socio-cultural re-orientation across the continent, as this editorial cartoon tries to argue.
Banking on personal experiences, empirical/participant observations and available records/data, this cartoon journalist laments through the above editorial cartoon that very many socio-cultural and religious forces abound in traditional African societies that reinforce and promote large families and make family planning or population control efforts complex and very difficult.
Until recently, very few governments in Africa had population control policies and or family planning programs to address population issues in their polities. This was not unconnected with cultural beliefs and misconceptions about reproductive health programs, chiefly viewed as Western intrigues to limit African population on selfish grounds. This wrong mindset is omnipresent across Sub-Saharan African cultures.
In Nigeria, for example, there is an unmet need for socio-cultural re-orientation about fecundity and family size. It is still a celebrated custom in many cultures here to have large families. In most parts of Igbo land (eastern Nigeria) from where this cartoon journalist hails, despite the well-articulated “National Policy on Population for sustainable Development (January, 2004)”, the on-the-ground realities faced by family planning advocates is that many people reject it is a foreign idea by western nations to limit the growth of Nigerian families.
The 2008 Demographic and Health Survey reveals that the fertility rate in Igbo land (southeast) is 4.8% while the percentage of married women who use modern family planning methods is 12% against that of the southwest that is 21%.
A man’s greatness is apparently measured by how many children he has. A woman’s status and relevance in the family and in the community improves with the more children she birthed who are alive.
The traditional “Ibu Eze” festival in parts of Igbo land, for example, is dedicated to honouring and celebrating our women who have given birth to nine or more children. She is showered with lots of gifts and respect. Other ignarant women craving for relevance and social security strive for the same recognition and honour of a lifetime. These are common population problems in Africa generally.
In Malawi, the high rate of illiteracy (about 67% of the country’s 9.8 million people) as well as cultural and religious beliefs regarding reproductive health has cost the country severe socio-economic stagnation. Now, family planning advocates like the Banja La Mtsogolo are increasingly pushing for the government to urgently step up reproductive health education.
In the early 1960s, the country abolished family planning on the grounds of widespread cultural misconception that reproductive health messages and programs were counter-culture to their belief that having many children amounts to more riches. In 1982, however, through persuasions, the government began to allow family planning services, but only under the guise of child spacing later renamed
Maternal Child Health. Since 1994, NGOs have made a lot of impact through awareness creation and cultural re-orientation: about 90% of the targeted group became aware of the contraceptive methods, though only 14% use them and about 36% were willing to delay pregnancies by 2 to 3 years but not by family planning methods.
In Tanzania, the government implemented a comprehensive family planning strategy in 1992 to reduce the country’s population growth rate to less than 2% per year by the year 2010. The government provided free contraceptive services through its Ministry of Health clinics. Yet, there were rumours that family planning pills made women infertile, caused deformed babies, cancer, itching private parts, and hampered conjugal sexual satisfaction and communication between married couples.
There were also myths that men had no role whatsoever to play in reproduction and fertility control. Commonly held cultural and religious beliefs and misconceptions about oral contraceptives, etc, held sway across the country, filliping the intervention by PSI-Tanzania - a local affiliate, of Population Services International - to introduce a consumer brochure as a creative education strategy to counter all the claims and beliefs.
In Cote D’Ivoire, alarmed by the 3.3% annual growth rate, a former Minister of Planning, Programming and Development conceded that only by educating women and young girls on the importance of family planning, how rapid population in the country be reduced, especially in rural areas where poverty forces parents to give away their teenage daughters into forced early marriages for material gains.
This list is endless but for space. As an informed pan-African, I can confidently say that experiences have shown that major hindrances to societal development and progress in sub-Saharan Africa today are traceable to retrogressive “cultural traditions” and needless norms.
In the context of population challenges, it is no more news that in Nigeria, for example, government policies as well as concerted efforts and contributions by non-governmental organisations and development advocates across the world aimed at controlling rapid population growth to achieve sustainable balance with available natural resources and healthy environment, continue to be frustrated and stagnated by the deep-seated and settled wrong cultural mindsets, attitudes and values of many “traditionists” who see the whole population agenda as nothing but western propaganda. Yet the truth remains that there are population changes the country cannot just ignore.
Last year, on September 1, 2010, to be precise, a report released in Abuja by the Next Generation Nigeria, captured trends in Nigeria’s population growth and economic performance, and projected into the future with a warning on an impending, “demographic disaster” looming over the most populous black nation in the world, expected to become the world’s 6th largest country by the year 2050, by the predictions of the Population Reference Bureau (PRB).
Despite the alarming population emergency in the country, many Nigerian men, out of a lack of spiritual culture and self-discipline, ignorance and or culture/tradition-driven rebellion, wild libido and clandestine sexual behavioural attitudes, continue to produce children they have no plans for their growth, welfare and general development.
“Why single out the men…?” you may ask. Because in Africa, we men call the shots in the acts that lead up to the human population in the first place, and, unfortunately,no adequate efforts have been directly focused on making men voluntarily commit to planned parenthood/family planning, especially at the grassroots, their traditions and cultural norms notwithstanding.
A lot of international investments and assistance have been pouring into Sub-Saharan Africa targeting women - who are at the receiving end – with the realization that the more African women are educated and empowered, the easier it becomes for them to negotiate sex, abstain, delay or prevent pregnancy with more education and access to contraception and family planning methods, etc.
But I see that something is left on the sidelines which ought not to be, and that is the reality that until boys and men in our society, particularly, are encouraged to voluntarily accept and make wise and responsible decisions about their libidos, sexual behaviours and family planning, as well as actively participate in its promotions, etc, we should expect a time bomb of more homeless and unemployable young people on our streets, causing havocs, constituting nuisance, creating insecurity, violence and all forms of criminality to destabilise the society – the latest of which is terrorism and suicide bombing.
Men in our society, especially within the marriage union, need a lot of cultural re-orientation, sexual discipline and respect for womanhood, especially within the context of their sexual rights and reproductive health, for family planning – and ultimately a sustainable environment – to work in Africa.
Rather than stereotyping to culturally destabilize the environment societies fighting to reclaim their cultural identities from western cultural imperialism” should employ cultural innovations that help young people go back to their roots without making culture to hurt and dehumanize or cause more hardships, especially in the context of sexual behaviours and beliefs.
The role of men in population control must become a central issue in the global demographic debates and investments. This is essentially important considering the fact that in Nigeria, for example, “men are generally regarded as the heads of households and they dominate sexual and reproductive health decision-making”, records the 2004 ‘National Police on Population for Sustainable Development”.
It continues, “Men often have greater say in sexual relations, use of family planning methods, access to productive resources and property inheritance….. Men who deny their sexual partners the use of contraception to space children or to prevent high-risk pregnancies also contribute to poor reproductive health among women.
To date, male participation and involvement in reproductive health issues have been low. Reproductive health programmes have focused mostly on women and children, and have failed to adequately target and provide men with appropriate information and services. Culture, religion, and socially sanctioned gender roles pose additional challenges.”
Analytical Description of the cartoon:
A critical study of the cartoon, the “Stupid Strategist”, is all revealing of a satire. A young, modern man had a vision to become greater in life than his father was (which in itself is a laudable aspiration). Alas! His definition of “greatness” leaves much to be desired. His main strategy to be taken to the appellation of a great son-of-the-soil in his family was to have a ‘football team’ or more children to add to his late peasant father’s 22 children (including himself).
http://nigerianobservernews.com/02092011/features/features1.html
This did not go down well with his more-informed wife who, after having six children already in their marriage union, saw the need for the couple to introduce family planning- both for her own health and for her husband’s economic benefit and those of the entire family in midst of worsening inflation, austerity and global economic recession among other vital reasons.
But her suggestion met stiff opposition and disapproval from ‘the man of the house’, a custom and tradition freak and a chip of the old block who felt insulted by his wife’s stance.
She must continue to prove her fecundity and give birth to as many children he so desires, no matter how she felt on the errorneous cultural grounds that “it is God who gives children and He knows how to provide for the welfare of the children;” moreover, “it is a taboo in Africa, for a woman to renege in producing all the “eggs of offsprings” in her belly, for the more children a man has determines how much respect he gets from his competitors, friends and foes.
This is modern times, for crying out loud, and such silly and myopic beliefs should be jettisoned for progress sake. Culture is dynamic and traditions that negate human dignity and healthy living, social justice and peaceful co-existence, should be done away with. We live in a global community, nowadays, and one man’s recklessness here in one little corner of the earth has a far-reaching consequence on other’ lives round the globe – on a long term!
A man should have the wisdom, knowledge, understanding and moral capital to willingly obey the ‘clarion calls’ for voluntary family planning in an apparently over populated society, and be disciplined and committed to having just as much children as he can adequately cater for and nurture.
Making a “bloated family unit” is old fashion, barbaric and retrogressive in today’s society, and since men (and boys) are the ones with the greater stake here, Nigeria, and of course, all of Sub-Saharan African nations, will be the better for it if more finances, enlightenments and energies are channeled towards polices and programmes that will make African male citizens to be more responsible and responsive to changing religious and socio-cultural beliefs and practices that inhibit reproductive health and sexuality issues.
These are the encapsulated messages in the cartoon “Stupid Strategist,” a visual satire intended to offer an enhanced perspective on the subject of population control to the African public, in the context of achieving a global population in balance with a healthy, secure and sustainable global environment.
The editorial cartoon has been repeatedly published in The NIGERAN OBSERVER since 2010, including one on Wednesday, May 4, 2011, possibly to drum the message deep down the hearts of our people. Our mumudon do
