The Rule of Law and Governance in Indigenous Yoruba Society by Bewaji John Ayotunde Isola;

Author:Bewaji, John Ayotunde Isola;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

There can be no rights, meaningful or otherwise, where there are no social, psychological, mythical, religious or economic factors that make such rights important to society. Clearly, international agencies existing on the grounds of being human rights advocates need to rethink their position. There were no dissociated, noninvolved and disinterested human rights advocates in traditional Yoruba societies, as each human in the society was an advocate for human rights, recognizing that the diminution of the rights of one member of my society is the abrogation of my own rights as a human being, yet human rights were defended, protected and enhanced by the collective responsibility and discipline of the consciousness of the fact that any abrogation of the human right of one is tantamount to the abrogation of the collective human rights of all. In various arts, cultural performances and political fora, efforts were made to ensure that human rights were protected. The masquerade in Esa-Oke in Osun State of Nigeria has a sub-set which is called “Saare,” and its annual appearance is usually anticipated for its entertainment value as well as its capacity to serve as the moral conscience of the people through its satirical disclosure of the scandals of the rich, the powerful, the poor, the indolent, the promiscuous, the petty thief and more. This annual ritual helps to psychologically and socially cleanse the society of ills that need to be prevented in the community, and also facilitates the process of redress-seeking and mediates friction in society. What the human rights agencies should be doing then is to be advocating that the conditions that make for the abuse of the rights of persons in society be removed. That is, rather than to be advocating for socioeconomic situations which are consequences of the predatory structuring of the social-economic and other conditions of life in Darwinian interaction and interface environments of the contemporary society, which make it possible for international human rights agencies to raise hell ex-post facto for the redress of rights, they need to see that abuses are consequences of systemic dysfunctionality of socioeconomic arrangements of relations of existence in contemporary society and are consequently a result of national and international structuring of reality.

What this means is that we should be well aware that the contemporary world national and international relations of human beings in society is based on a distorted understanding of reality and humanity. We insist that the factors responsible for this are numerous, and these range from the structure of the United Nations Organization itself to the various trade systems imposed by the societies of the North, from educational structures to information systems and their centers of coordination and dissemination around the world, from social and economic to religious and other structures of interaction around the world. The world may encrypt human rights in whatever format they so desire, for as long as things remain the way they are, the conditions for the abuse of human rights would continue to exist in both the rich and the poor societies of the world.

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