Harsh economy, insecurity tweaking traditions in Nigeria

…Many more people now bury the dead in cities

…Traditional marriage rites hold outside villages

Nigeria’s growing economic hardship and rampaging insecurity are changing the dynamics of age-long traditions and cultures that are sacred to tribes and ethnic groups.

Today, local events including traditional marriages, burials, new yam festivals and others that people usually hold in their villages and hometowns are now held in cities and even overseas without having to travel home or come down to Nigeria for those resident in the diaspora.

In some tribes, it is a custom to hold traditional marriages in the village, whereby the husband-to-be is expected to go to the hometown of the bride-to-be to perform all the traditional rites with the bride’s kinsmen.

Hyacinth Nweke is a Lagos-based retiree from Enugu State, and he held the traditional marriage of her first daughter in Lagos at the peak of insecurity in 2021 to avoid the risk of travelling down to his hometown in Enugu.

“My wife and I decided to hold our daughter’s traditional marriage in Lagos because we heard at that time that the roads to the eastern part of the country were hotspots for insecurity, especially herdsmen, unknown gunmen and kidnappers.

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“We just requested for the marriage list from my kinsmen, which they sent to us via social media and we gave the list to our-in-laws. We did all the marriage rites here in Lagos and sent the required things down to the village. We had to send money down to the village for our kinsmen to buy all the necessary things to perform the marriage rites as expectedon our behalf,” Nweke said.

Nweke said he hadn’t travel home for traditional marriages for over five years as most people from his hometown now hold such events in their state of residence.

Oluchi Onyemachi, a Benin-based businesswoman, said her younger brother did the traditional marriage of his wife in Lagos two years ago.

She said her brother married a lady from the Ideato in Imo State, an area that has been troubled by political crisis for years now.

“Our family members had to move down to Lagos for the traditional marriage because the father of the bride said that their hometown was in turmoil and I don’t the story has changed since then. My mother travelled from Enugu to Lagos while I travelled from Benin to Lagos to attend the traditional marriage,” she said.

In Igbo land, for instance, it used to be compulsory for the corpses of dead Igbo men and women to be taken to their villages for proper burial, not at cemeteries in the cities.

But these days, people are also burying their loved ones in the cities without having to convey the remains to the village while traditional marriages are done in the cities.

These cultural changes are happening today due to two major reasons. They include avoiding huge cost implications involved in travelling from the city to the countryside and reducing the security risk of travelling on Nigerian roads.

Esan is a popular tribe in Edo State, and they occupy the central part of Edo State where it is believed that indigenes of the Esanland especially their women are not to be buried outside their hometown, but that is gradually changing.

“My sister died in the US last year, but her husband and children were not able to bring her remains home. She was buried in America. Our family gave my brother-in-law an ultimatum that he must bring the remains of my sister home, yet he was not able,” Ojiemen Oseghale, a banker, told BusinessDay Sunday.

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Oseghale said that burying their dead in their hometown is an age-long tradition that is believed to have ancestral implications, but modernisation is gradually changing that tradition.

Igbo people are another set of people who also believe in making sure that the remains of their loved ones are taken back to their hometowns irrespective of where they died but that is also changing.

Today, Igbos are burying their loved ones in the cemeteries located in the cities for many reasons.

“Two years ago, my friend’s sister died in Lagos, and she was buried in one of the cemeteries in the state without her body being conveyed home. The lady who died was not married at that time, but she was in her mid-40s with her both parents already dead,” said Adaeze Onyemaechi, a designer.

According to her, the deceased family didn’t have the resources to take the remains of the dead home to Ebonyi State coupled with the fact that both of their parents were no more.

“It is becoming common these days for Igbo people to hold burials in the cities due to lack of money to transport their loved ones back to their villages. With fuel subsidy removal and subsequent adjustment in petrol pump prices which is now at between N897/litre and over N1,000 in most cases, the cost of transportation has skyrocketed.

“Reverse to three to five years ago, people were spending between N70,000 and N120,000 to take corpse to their hometown but today people are spending over N300,000 to hire an ambulance to move corpse from one region in Nigeria to another,” said Ignatius Osadebe, a man of Igbo origin.

Apart from burials, other annual cultural events that used to be frequently attended with fanfare are nowadays going low-key. Festivals such as the New Yam Festival and ofala ceremony are being organised these days in the cities and even in the diaspora to avoid unnecessary expenditures and travel stress.

In countries like the UK, the US and Canada, many Nigerians in the diaspora are often seen on social media marking symbolic festivals such as New Yam just like people in Nigeria also celebrate the event.