Otunba Olusegun Runsewe, the Director-General, National Council for Art and Culture, on Tuesday called on Nigerian youths to uphold cultural values to reduce social vices.
Runsewe made the call in Abuja during a cultural roundtable on social values with the theme: “Morality, Culture and the Nigerian Youths’’.
He said that the programme was aimed at reawakening the consciousness of Nigerian youths on those cultural and social values that had gone into extinction.
Runsewe described social values as admirable attitudes such as hope, sense of duty, acceptable standards of right and wrong, hard work, accountability and other humane qualities.
He said that these values were acquired through cultural traditions and transmitted from one generation to another.
Runsewe said that these cultural values guaranteed peace, orderliness and harmonious society, however, expressed worry that these values had been truncated by present generation.
“The high rate of immorality and moral decadence posed a palpable threat to the peace, social cohesion, mutual trust and respect for which our society is build.
“We have the patriotic duty of probing deeper into these challenges that so brazenly threaten our peaceful co-existence and begin to fashion out modalities to solve them,” he said.
The director noted that the forum would provide a veritable platform to collectively direct the reproductive efforts toward using cultural norms and values in solving the current national challenges such as insecurity, poverty and moral decadence.
The Chairperson of the occasion, Mrs Hajo Sani, Senior Special Assistant to President Muhammadu Buhari on Women Affairs and Administration, said that the social vices had eaten deep into the society, especially among our youths.
Sani said that the society had become bad as “we try to overlook the cultural heritage that binds us.’’
“Culture is the people’s way of life and we have to cherish and judiciously guide our cultural values, transmit same to young people to ensure sound moral in them.
“Women are the agent of socialisation and they should inculcate the moral upbringing to their children,” she said.
Sani, therefore, urged the director to ensure that the initiative was taken to the grassroots, schools, churches and mosques to sensitise them on cultural values.
The Managing Director, African Independent Television, Mrs Tosin Dokpesi, described morality and cultural norms as the principles of good behaviour, acceptable manner and conduct “which are opposite of what we see today’’.
Dokpesi said that this was a time when national life was at risk, when citizens pursue wealth without knowledge, without character, pleasure without conscience, commerce without morality and polity without principles.
“Today some Nigerians have cultivated the culture of immorality and we see where we are today.
”In the past, it was wrong to see a young person wear tattoos without sending ill signal to the society but today it is common without anyone frowning at it,” she said. (NAN)
