Many Canadian firms find the export of physical
products to Nigeria a challenge, sometimes regardless of the abilities of their
local representation, due to problems in … ix) the physical and
psychological distance between Nigeria and Canada … This goes
some way to explain why the more successful Canadian ventures tend to be either
service-oriented or have established business facilities directly in the
marketplace.
InfoExport - The Canadian Trade Commissioner Service
“The
Canadian Dimension in the Nigerian Economy,” January 2003. [emphasis
added]
What has happened to
The answer is quite simple. No-one gives a damn. The
country has rulers instead of leaders - they set the example; and in a bid to
survive the system we all stupidly follow, and sink lower.
In the traffic this morning, the drivers myself included did what we had
to get by.
I drove up the wrong side of the road with everyone
else, and along the verge to try to weedle my way through the jam caused by the
petrol queues, causing more havoc as I went. I would never do this back home,
so why was I doing it here I wondered?
Hilary Andersson, BBC Correspondent, Lagos, 1998
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/107731.stm
On re-reading the text, it occurs to me I’ve left
out a lot of the good things about
Robert Guest, 2004,
Correspondent for the Economist
The Shackled Continent: Power,
Corruption and African Lives,
African joie de vivre has always impressed
visitors… In fact, cheerfulness can survive in unlikely places.
Robert Calderisi,
The Trouble With
My general impression during my stay here is that the
image that Nigerians have abroad of being obnoxious, overbearing and
short-tempered is undeserved.
BBC correspondent Joseph Winter (21
April, 2003).
"
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/2935491.stm
The World Values Survey... answers are
eye-opening. When asked in 2000,
for example, whether it is especially important for children to be encouraged
at home to learn "hard work", 61 percent of Americans said yes, whereas
80 percent of Nigerians, 75 percent of South Africans, and 83 percent of
Tanzanians responded affirmatively.
This answer and others hardly demonstrated social values of laziness in
Jeffrey Sachs (2005).
The End of
Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time,
Pat Utomi,
World Economic Forum (2000). The African
Competitiveness Report 2000/2001
Our women know how to show respect for their men. They also know how to cook real
food. None of these Burger King or
Big Macs. Rice, gumbo sauce with
hot pepper, and fresh and clean meat.
That is what I miss. I want
to sit outside with my friends and talk into the night. I want to be in a place that has real
Muslim friendship.
El Hadj Moru Sifi,
Undocumented Nigerien migrant street merchant in
Quoted in: Paul Stoller (2002). Money Has No Smell: The
Africanization of
Another important problem with the programs and methods
of these NGOs is that they have almost always paid scant attention, if any at
all, to those aspects of the cultures that constitute Nigeria's social fabric
that tend to support their struggle for human dignity, and that can help
legitimate that struggle... This parallels a similar historical tendency within
the larger international human rights movement in which African culture tends
to be seen almost exclusively as a source of human rights violations and almost
never as a source of the norms that can ground a human rights renaissance on
the continent. In tending to tow
this sort of line, these Nigerian NGOs have missed yet another easily available
step on their route to their own popular legitimization. Had these NGOs attempted to study and
understand the various local cultures in Nigeria, with a view to gleaning those
aspects of these cultural systems that support their human rights work, they
would be in a much better position today to understand and speak the various
languages of human dignity that are widely and continually spoken by most
ordinany Nigerians -- languages that form part of a rich, long, and continuous
tradition of struggle against violations of human rights.
Obiora
Chinedu Okafor (2006).
Nigerian-Canadian professor of law,
Legitimizing human rights NGOs:
lessons from
One
thing that seems to come up all over the continent in recent years is a shift
from a focus on temporal dynamics of societal progress toward a new reliance on
individual spatial mobility. How is
one to escape the low global status of being “a poor African”? Not through “patience” and
the progress of national or societal development, but by leaving, going
elsewhere, even in the face of terrible danger. Today, anthropological fieldworkers in
James Ferguson (2006).
Global Shadows:
Poverty, despair and violence are usually rooted in
failed institutions of basic governance and rule of law. This is where
Speech
from the Throne to the Third
Session of the
Thirty-Eighth Parliament of
Unstructured
postings in areas like “community development”,
“capacity-building”, “institution building”,
agricultural extension, and even public health are much more difficult. …
This is even truer for postings in the fields of governance and human rights.
The more unstructured the job, the greater will be the need for support. And
support for international staff in unstructured positions, especially in
fragile states, cannot be provided by telephone. These sorts of postings must
be backed by experienced, on-the-ground field staff employed by Canadian or
other international organizations.
Ian Smillie, CUSO
CUSO Executive Director, 1979-1983,
“Hubris, Humility and Human
Resources: Notes on the Proposed Canada Corps”, October, 2004
http://www.ccic.ca/e/docs/002_cda_corps_hubrishumility_final.pdf
The rate of expatriate failure is a subject of
considerable debate. Irrespective
of the precise percentage of failures, all agree that the human and financial
costs associated with personnel who do not succeed are great. GLOBE researchers speculate that
expatriate failure rates should be associated with the cultural distance
between the home and the host country.
Robert J. House et al, (2004) Culture, Leadership, and
Organizations:
The GLOBE Study of 62 Societies,
Nigerian
Views on Cultural Change
Disorienting,
Dis-occidenting, Diss Africa-ning
DOMESTIC AND INTERNATIONAL POLLING/SURVEY DATA
World
Values Surveys, 1990 & 2000
Some Basic
Socio-economic Contrasts: Canadians and Nigerians
Canadians’ Volunteer Participation in Global Social
Justice
Canadians’ Support for International Development
Aid
FLUX AND STASIS IN NIGERIA OVER THE 1990s
Reasons to
expect stasis in Nigerian attitudes and behaviours between 1990 and 2000
Signifiers
of social change under macro-economic stasis
Nigeria and
the UN Millennium Development Goals
Within-Nigeria
Variability in Social Indicators
Gallup
2005: All 18 Published Responses
Pew and World Values Survey Data
Rankings
Pew
2002: Nigeria Highest in the Range of Country Responses (80-100%)
WVS
2000: Nigeria Highest in the Range of Country Responses (80-100%)
Disagreement:
Pew Results for 2002
Disagreement:
WVS Results for 2000
Disagreement:
WVS Results for 1990
Agreement:
Pew Results for 2002
Pew Global
Attitudes Project: 44-Nation Major Survey (2002)
Agreement:
WVS Results for 2000
Agreement:
WVS Results for 1990
GLOBE Study
of 62 Societies (1997)
Social
Axioms Project (Bond & Leung)
Gowdy,
Iorgulescu & Onyeiwu, 2003
Analysis of
Canadian-Nigerian Value Disparities by Topic, WVS 2000 and 1990
Nigerian
Muslims and Nigerian Christians: Some Significant Differences
Public
Morality, “Corruption”, and the Unregulated Economy
Transparency International: Corruption Perceptions Indexes
Transparency International: Global Corruption Barometer,
2005
Anthropological Interpretations of the Western-defined
“Corruption”
Nigerian
“Family Values”, Vertical Transmission of the Ties that Bind,
Obedience & Impunity
Trust, Reciprocity
and Fairness
Individualism
and Locus of Control: Fatalism vs. Free Choice
One
Modernity or Alternative Modernities? Nigerian Social Dynamics, Thriving on
Indeterminacy
Case
Studies in Nigeria Migrant Workers’ Home Remittances
APPENDIX 1: Nigerian Immigration Statistics
The Nigerian Diaspora in OECD
countries, and their remittances
United States Diversity Visa Lottery
Nigerian Diaspora in Europe and North America
Nigerian-Canadian Home Remittance Estimates Compared to
Canadian Aid to Nigeria
Net
Official Development Assistance to Nigeria from Selected OECD Nations (US$,
millions)
Aid, Foreign Investment and Debt Service Compared to
Gross Domestic Product, 2003
Net Migration Rates from Nigeria, 1995-2050
APPENDIX
2. ENVIRONICS 3SC SOCIAL VALUES
SURVEY
ABSTRACT
What
is the “intercultural distance” between
This document reviews the sociological and
psychological literature over the last decade and a half, primarily from
European and North American sources, involving cross-national values surveys
that have included both Nigerians and Canadians within their samples. The purpose is to identify
semi-quantitatively, as opposed to anecdotally, both the key commonalities and
the acute differences between citizens from these two countries, in terms of
generalized beliefs, social norms and behaviours. By finely calibrating the
"intercultural distance" along multiple attitudinal scales, Canadians
and Nigerians may begin to dismantle innate assumptions and good or bad
stereotypes about each other, and hopefully undertake more effective
intercultural communication and collaboration. This is particularly crucial in the
domain of global justice advocacy and social transformation/re-engineering,
where the aim is literally "changing the way people think", and,
ultimately, how they act.
Owing
to their demographic predominance on the continent, Nigerians have been
included in major international surveys since the 1970s, yet there appears to
have been no systematic review of these potentially rich sources of data to
date. They represent a valuable set
of Nigerian attitudinal data that both international and indigenous civil
society groups should exploit as external benchmark indicators for comparison
against their own local and regional development interventions. In this review, Canadians’ and
Nigerians’ responses are presented from six surveys: World Values Survey 1990 and 2000,
Pew Global Attitudes Survey 2002, Gallup 2005 Voice of the People,
GLOBE Survey 1997, and
the Social Axioms
Survey 2002. Collectively, they
polled approximately 3,500 Canadians and 5,100 Nigerians between 1990 and
2005. Respondents from both these
nationalities were asked 826 questions in common, from which the results of 500
are presented in this report.
Supplementing these data are selected results from eight other surveys,
Geert Hofstede’s Culture Dimensions
(1967-1973), the Transparency International Corruption
Perceptions Index and Global
Corruption Barometer, three Nigerian-only studies (Afrobarometer
2002; Demographic & Health Survey (DHS), Nigerian Federal Office for
Statistics, 1990; Gowdy,
Iorgulescu, and Onyeiwu 2003), one pan-African survey (BBC
Pulse of Africa 2004), and one study that included only Nigerian and
Canadian university students (Gire and Carment, 1992).
HIGHLIGHTS
·
Given the
option, three-quarters of Nigerians surveyed in 2004 said they would
emigrate. In May 2004, 750
Nigerians from all walks of life were asked by the BBC
which country they would most prefer to live in, and only 27% chose Nigeria;
out of the ten African countries surveyed, just one other country’s
respondents (Malawi) ranked their own country lower as the first choice to live
in. Seventeen percent of Nigerians
wanted to move to the
·
About one in
five thousand Nigerians emigrates annually, and one in fifteen thousand enters
the
·
One in every 500 persons who were born in
·
Migrants’
home remittances: Nigerians who have left their rural homes for work in
Nigeria’s urban centres, and Nigerians who have emigrated overseas, are
remitting about 8% of their earnings to family members and their home
communities [Gowdy,
Iorgolescu and Onyeiwu, 2004; Osili,
2004]. Proportionally, that’s
about ten times more effective wealth redistribution than the UN Millennium
Development Goals and Make Poverty
History targets of 0.7% of high-income nations’ GNP allocated to
official development assistance by 2015. Private transfers from the Nigerian
diaspora amounted to $1.677 billion in 2003 [IMF 2004:141],
compared to $317.6 million in official development assistance receipts, $1.23
billion in direct foreign investment, and outflows of $1.64 billion in loan
repayments [UNDP
2005: Tables 14,19]. Nigerian
expatriates’ remittances (about $6,000 per expatriate Nigerian) were
equivalent to 2.9% of
·
Expatriate
Nigerians’ average remittances to their families and communities back
home, $7,800 in 2000, exceeded Nigeria’s per capita GDP (PPP $) by a
factor of 7.7, placing it well ahead of the ratio for Sudanese expatriates
(7.5) and Ghana (1.5). These data may
go a long way to explaining the enormous immigration pressure experienced by
young and un- or under-employed Nigerian university graduates [Adams
2003:22-24; OECD
2004:148-149]. Nigerian
migrants’ high rates of home remittances may be supported by World Values
Survey responses that showed that in 1990, 71%, and in 2000, 73% of Nigerians
polled said that obedience is a quality that “children should be
encouraged to learn at home” compared to only 28% and 30% of Canadians,
respectively [World Values Survey: V236, A042]
·
Considering the
sum of official development aid, foreign direct investment, and debt service,
·
Nigerians
residing in
·
Income appears
to improve life satisfaction significantly better than one’s level of
educational attainment. For Nigerians, their income level increases perceptions of happiness and
feelings of life satisfaction nearly twice as strongly as do levels of
educational attainment. Going
from the poorest third to the richest third of Nigerians, self-reported life
satisfaction (a rating of 7 to 10 on a 10-point scale) increased by 26
percentage points, from 54% to 80%, but only increased by 13 percentage points
for happiness, reported as "very happy" (from 61% to
74%). However, going from the least-educated to best-educated thirds of
Nigerians, satisfaction increased only by 15 percentage points, from 57% to
72%, while those reporting themselves to be "very happy", the
increase was only ten percentage points, from 62% to 72%. Thus, high income
influences Nigerians’ satisfaction 73% more strongly than high
educational attainment [World Values Survey: A108, A170].
·
Asking people to rate their overall life satisfaction could be a useful
proxy for the UNDP’s Human Development Index (HDI). When self-reported
satisfaction is regressed against national aggregates of longevity, education,
and income, forty-three per cent of the variation in responses in 2000 from
persons in 66 nations to the question “All things considered, how
satisfied are you with your life as a whole these days?” was
statistically correlated with the HDI for the same year [World Values Survey,
2000: Q. A008; UNDP,
Human Development Report 2005, Table 2].
·
In low-income
countries such as
·
Among the UNDP’s 32 “low human development” countries,
Nigerians have the third-highest educational attainment, yet
·
On twelve attitudinal scales relating to democracy, work, and
interpersonal trust, Nigerian Muslims and Nigerian Christians in 2000 were
statistically indistinguishable by their survey responses. However, the same survey data do show
that Nigerian Christians express significantly higher respect for others,
higher sexuality and gender role tolerance, and are more likely to encourage
their children to practice determination and perseverance than Nigerian
Muslims. Conversely, Nigerian
Muslims practice their faith more frequently than Nigerian Christians, and
express lower belief in free choice.
These differences are reflected consistently across eight other African,
Asian and European nations having both large Islamic and non-Islamic
populations.
Nine countries, including Nigeria, with significant proportions of both
Christian (or Hindu) and Muslim populations were compared across 18 attitudinal
scales pertaining to work, interpersonal trust and respect, religiosity, gender
roles and democratic participation.
Nigerian Muslims and Nigerian Christians showed no statistically
different attitudes with respect to attitudes towards democratic institutions,
work, thrift, or interpersonal trust, however there were statistically
significant differences regarding the importance of religion in their lives
(higher for Muslims), belief in free choice, perseverance, and tolerance for
working women, abortion and prostitution (all higher for Christians) [Esmer 2004].
·
Materially deprived, yet indefatigably optimistic: Fifty-eight percent of Nigerians
reported being unable to afford food, health care or clothing at least once
during 2001, compared to just 13% of Canadians [Pew 2002:Q87.a],
yet 86% of Nigerians are optimistic about their futures [Pew 2002: Q2
& 4]. The 2005 Gallup International Voice
of the People poll found a similar result for a survey of 500 Nigerians:
56% said “there were times in the last year when [they] did not have
enough money to buy food”, while only 5% of Canadians made this claim
[Gallup International 2005:4-5]. Statistics
Canada reported that 15% of Canadians were “food-insecure” in
2000/01, defined broadly as worrying or actually having an insufficient
quantity or quality of food to eat.
Nevertheless, more Nigerians profess to be “very happy” than
in 80 other nations surveyed in 2000 (WVS 2000:A008), and Nigerians professed
the third-highest level of “personal optimism” among 44 nations,
after
·
A university education determines Canadians’ support for global
social justice twice as strongly as age or income level. Voluntary membership in
third world development or human rights organisations triples from 3.3%, for
Canadians having completed secondary school, to 9.5% for university
graduates. Whether a Canadian is in
the middle or high income group, they are twice as likely to belong to global
justice organisations (6%) than those in the low income group, while being over
the age of 30 doubles membership in these organisations. Canadian university graduates are also
32% more likely to support increased economic aid to developing countries
compared to secondary school graduates [World Values Survey 2000: A070,
E129].
·
Research findings on individualism/collectivism orientations
between Canadians and Nigerians are contradictory, but labelling Nigerians as
more collectivist is probably an over-generalisation. In
a study in the early 1990s that exclusively compared Nigerian to Canadian
university students, no overall differences were found along a standard
psychological scale of individualism-collectivism. However, the student subjects at the
·
Igbo Nigerian villagers demonstrate levels of fairness and social
reciprocity similar to peoples in other “traditional” cultures in
·
Sharp socio-economic stratification of social trust
is found among high-income countries, but not in low-income countries. Income and education
increased Canadians' perceptions of general societal trust and belief in
fairness in both 1990 and 2000 by fifteen to twenty percentage points, but
there were no significant inter-generational differences. In the
case of the
·
On average, university-educated Canadians operate on the presumption of
trust and fairness, while university-educated Nigerians operate on the
presumption of deceit. 39% of Canadians (54% for those with university degrees) believed in
2000 that “most people can be trusted”, compared with 26% of
Nigerians (24% of university graduates), and a global average of 28% (36%,
university graduates); for the two East African nations surveyed, trust is close
to the bottom of the 61-country sample range, at 8%. Canadians’ support for the
statement “most people try to be fair” increased from 59% for those
with primary education to 77% for university graduates (with a similar effect
for income), however, for Nigerians, support for this assumption remained
around 29% regardless of income or education level. Overall, Nigerians’
“fairness” assumption, was two-thirds of the global mean of 43%,
while overall Canadian support was 67%.
[WVS 2000: A165, A168].
·
Nigerian business managers see a very large gap between existing
behaviour and desired behaviour, much larger than for other countries. The
GLOBE survey data are particularly interesting in that they represent Nigerian
business managers as recognizing that they would like to be much more humane,
more institutionally-collective, less assertive, more future-oriented, and more
performance-oriented, yet the gap in existing practice and desired behaviour is
great indeed. This confirms that
Nigerian managers recognize they are quite different in behavioural
orientation, but it offers no explanations. [GLOBE 1997].
·
Nigerians and Canadians differ most acutely in their attitudes towards
gender roles and sexuality. An analysis of survey differences across 14 broad thematic categories in
the 2000 World Values Surveys revealed that for twelve categories including
religion, work, ecology and health, aggregate opinions were not significantly
different, i.e., large differences (over 50% of the country range) in
individual questions were cancelled out a nearly equal number of questions with
close agreement (under 15% of response range). Only with respect to questions
concerning gender roles and sexuality did Canadians’ responses differ by
20% across the country range, while in the area of government and politics, the
two countries’ opinions were 11% more likely to agree within 15% of range
as opposed to differ by more than 50% of range. Analysis of the 2002 Pew survey data
corroborated the latter result, but not the former, but this is partly due to
differences in the construction of the survey instrument content; the Pew
results showed large value differences with respect to perceptions of life
(crime, determinants of individual success, personal optimism).
·
Rose-tinted futures.
Nigerians persistently express higher levels of optimism for themselves
and their families - faith in a better future - than most other
nationalities. On two independently-conducted social surveys in 2000 and 2002,
Nigerians’ overall life satisfaction placed about 20 to 40 percentage
points above countries with similar “human development indexes”
such as Ghana, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Bangladesh and Pakistan [UNDP 2000; WVS 2000: A170; Pew 2002:Q2]. Similarly, Canadians place higher on
life satisfaction in both surveys than is predicted by the statistical linear
regression.
·
73% of Nigerians and 81% of Canadians believe that corruption
“moderately” or “largely” affects political life in
their country [Transparency
International 2005: Q.1.1]; 7% of Canadians and 48% of Nigerians believed
that their respective customs officers were “extremely corrupt” [TI
2005: Q4.1]. Given that the
Corruptions Perception Index is largely contingent on the views of Western
business people attempting to negotiate trade borders, the CPI does not
accurately depict domestic levels of corruption.
INTRODUCTION
The compiler of this review is a Canadian who
worked in
This approach resonates with some of the ideas of
the anthropologist James Ferguson, who has studied the relationship between
Southern African and high-income nations since the 1980s.
[T]he familiar anthropological claim that “they have their own
culture” carries something of the same effect in cultural analysis as the
development planner’s claim that “they have their own
economy” does in economic analysis – namely, the closing off from
view of those connections and relations that would allow for a very different
analysis… It problematizes the “givens” and demands an
accounting of why cultures are
“different,” “exotic,” “isolated,” or what
have you, and how they got to be that way.
[Ferguson 2006:68].
There is ample recent evidence that cultural
misunderstandings, however innocuously initiated, can become sparks, lighting
conflagrations of intense emotions and even acts of violence. Canadian
condemnation of events in Nigeria's recent history attests to that: positively
when Canada urged the Commonwealth to ostracise the military regime of General
Sani Abacha, and quite adversely when Canadians criticised the imposition of
Shari’a law in some Nigerian states.
Many have noted that, on a continent where, until
recently, individual opinions have been long suppressed, Nigerians are the
first to criticise their own society and government; even during the repressive
military regime under Babangida and Abacha, their newspapers were quite
outspoken, despite assassinations of journalists like Dele Giwa. But when an
outsider states an opinion about
In February 2002, Jeff Koinange, a Kenyan-American
CNN news correspondent interviewed Lagosians during the ethnic violence in
Mushin and Idi-Araba and then filed a story on CNN television claiming that
"Nigerians are tired of democracy and now want the military
back...Soldiers have taken over the streets of Lagos and the people are happy
because they believe that only soldiers can ensure security." Outraged by
such a claim that could undermine the democratisation process after 15 years of
military rule,
The Canadian political scientist Rhoda Howard-Hassmann
has carried an extended analysis of recent Canadian-Nigerian "cultural
dissonance" within the public sphere with respect to the post-1999
imposition of Shari’a law in some northern Nigerian states, and its
perceived curtailment of women’s rights by many Canadians:
Howard-Hassmann,
Rhoda E. [Global Studies Program,
Excerpts
(
p. 3: Canadian members of the public and of Amnesty International sent
many letters. As Nolen herself noted, even "grannies from
p. 3: The early flogging of Bariya Magazu may have been in response to
outside interference and pressure to overturn her sentence. Resentment of
Canadians’ interference may have pushed the authorities of Zamfara to
take more precipitate action than they might have taken, had their only
criticism come from fellow Muslims or fellow Nigerians.
The constant reporting in Canada of Bariya’s sentence as if
"Sharia" or "Muslim" law is a monolithic, inherently cruel
form of law did not contribute to cultural understanding. Ordinary readers of
the Globe and Mail and other sources were under the impression that
Bariya Magazu had no recourse under Muslim law. They were not informed, for
example, that under Zamfara’s own legal code her sentence could have been
reduced to 20 strokes, rather than 100, because she was under 18 (Imam
2001). Nor were they aware
that Quranic law had been violated, in so far as there were no witnesses to her
alleged act of zina, and other rules of evidence had not been followed. As
reported in
These Canadian misunderstandings of Islamic law may well have
contributed to resentment of the West in the Muslim world. As one Muslim
Canadian put it, “Telling Muslims that they should not apply Sharia is
neither a wise step, nor a productive one.” (Khan, S., 2001)
p.14: None of the above analysis means, therefore, that Canadians or
other Westerners, or indeed liberal, secular, or non-Muslim Africans interested
in human rights, should stop doing what they are doing. Owens Wiwa, brother of
the hanged Nigerian playwright Ken Saro-Wiwa and a resident of
Bariya Magazu herself may not have been able to express her pain and
humiliation at being flogged, or may have been sufficiently intimidated not to
express it. Or, she may have accepted the punishment as in some manner just,
despite her early protestations that she had been raped. But perhaps she did
draw heart from knowing that some people in faraway
Many observers have found that there is something
really unique about Nigerians among African people, and these include Nigerians
who have just left their country:
Hunt, J.Timothy (2005). The Politics of Bones:
Dr. Owens Wiwa and the Struggle for
Owens Wiwa, born in 1957 and junior brother to
Ogoni human rights and environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, fled from Nigeria
with his family into the Benin Republic on 13 November, 1995, three days after
his brother and eight other Ogoni men were hanged extrajudicially under the
Nigerian military regime. It was
Owens's first time outside of
p. 281: "After the crackpot chaos of
This may relate to the legacy of British indirect
rule in
The Canadian Robert Calderisi worked for 26 years
in international development, including two years with the Canadian
International Development Agency (CIDA) in
p. 178; 179: "Unfortunately, international good will and
imaginative arrangements like the Chad-Cameroon pipeline wil not help
Of course, the construction of stereotypes
and false assumptions isn’t limited to a single set of players. If the praxis of social transformation
and social justice is about attitudinal and behavioural modification, it
behooves us in cooperating societies in the north and south to carefully gather
and interpret empirically the dynamics of cultural value changes. This will move us beyond the rubric of
cultural imperialism that may be expressed in the federal government’s Speech from the Throne to
the Canadian Parliament in October 2004:
Poverty, despair and violence are usually rooted in
failed institutions of basic governance and rule of law. This is where
What
is needed is some empirical understanding, a topographical mapping of where value differences lie, and how
large they are, between the multitude of communities involved in “social
justice”, and that is the overarching theme of this paper. Today, terms like
“modernity”, “development”, or “global
rights” cannot be universally and narrowly defined in Euroamerican terms,
as the Congolese-American philosopher has eloquently demonstrated:
Mudimbe, V.Y. (1988). The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge,
p.72-73 : "Evolutionism,
functionalism, diffusionism -- whatever the method, all repress otherness in
the name of sameness, reduce the different to the already known, and thus
fundamentally escape the task of making sense of other worlds."
There
is considerable evidence that cultural values are quite resilient over time, i.e.
independent of other political and economic changes. Robert J. House, principal investigator
for the GLOBE study that is presented in this paper, writes (House 2004:54):
p.54:
“Studies in many geographic regions show consistent results
between earlier and subsequent studies even though as many as 20 years may have
elapsed between the time the two studies were conducted. Hofstede’s rankings of counries by
cultural dimensions, which are based on data collected between 1967 and 1973,
have been replicated by several studies of selected countries in the lates
1980s and 1990s [Hoppe, M. (1993). “The effects of national cultural on
the theory and practice of managing R&D professionals abroad,”
R&D Management 23(4):313-325].
What little evidence exists suggest that change in fundamental cultural
values such as those studied by Hofstede [Culture’s
Consequences: International differences in work-related values
So-called
etic values are judged to be
universal, i.e., culture-free and
scientifically measurable, while emic
values are culture-specific, reflecting culturally-defined explanations of
truth.
There
is evidence elsewhere that self-reported conditions of deprivation of basic
human needs have not changed significantly over the last three decades. In 1974-76, the polling firm Gallup
International conducted their first “Global Survey” of human needs
and satisfactions. Out of 9,072
survey respondents in 57 nations, they included 377 Nigerians, 105 Tanzanians
and 82 South Africans, along with other sub-Saharan Africans, and reported
their responses only in aggregate form as 914 sub-Saharan Africans; 1,032
Canadians were also included [Gallup International, 1977:69]. To the question “[h]ave there been
times during the last year when you did not have money enough to buy food your
family needed?”, 71% of sub-Saharan Africans responded “yes”,
compared to 6% of Canadians.
Subsequent Gallup global polls have repeated this question, most
recently in 2005, at which time 56% of Nigerians replied “yes”,
compared to 5% of Canadians [Gallup
2005:4,5]. A separate poll
conducted by the Pew Global Trust in 2002 found that 10% of Canadians and 56%
of Nigerians reported inability at least once in the last year to afford food [Pew 2002:Q.87a]. However, there appear to be
discrepancies in sampling methodology, or statistical validity, given that the
variation in Ghanaian and Kenyan responses between the Pew 2002 and Gallup 2005
surveys differ widely by 33 and 17
percentage points, respectively!
Only the Nigerian and Canadian responses were similar.
|
Have there been times
in the last year when you did not have enough money to afford… |
Food |
Clothing |
Medical expenses,
health care |
|
|
|||
|
|
6% |
12% |
4% |
|
Sub-Saharan (41% of whom, Nigerians) |
71% |
81% |
57% |
|
Pew, 2002 (2) |
|||
|
|
10% |
16% |
13% |
|
|
56% |
60% |
58% |
|
|
65% |
66% |
71% |
|
|
56% |
56% |
67% |
|
|
|||
|
|
10% |
n/a |
n/a |
|
|
56% |
n/a |
n/a |
|
|
32% |
n/a |
n/a |
|
|
39% |
n/a |
n/a |
|
Afrobarometer (4) |
|||
|
|
41% |
n/a |
36% |
|
|
49% |
n/a |
69% |
Sources
(1)
(2)
(3)
(4)
Lewis, Peter; Alemika, Etannibi; Bratton, Michael (2002). “Down To Earth:
Changes In Attitudes Toward Democracy And Markets In
Afrobarometer,
a consortium of The Institute for Democracy in South Africa (IDASA), Center for
Democratic Development (CDD-Ghana), and Michigan State University (MSU),
Department of Political Science, has conducted two broad attitudinal surveys in
Nigeria, in 2000, and
2001, and the results in the above table concur within ten percentage points of
the American-based Pew and
There is at least some evidence to support
stasis in Nigerian household budgets.
The anthropologist Jane Guyer surveyed Yoruba farmers in Idere, Nigeria
in 1968 and again in 1988, and found that “[i]n general, the proportion
of total money expenditure devoted to just living, to consumption in the narrowest
sense, has stayed almost exactly the same over this twenty-year period. Change in the asset/debt/investment
domain is almost entirely accounted for by a shift from ceremonial and gift
conversions to investment in production” and that “[t]he real value
of their money incomes from farming had risen by about 25 percent over the
twenty-year period as a result of the complex of influences exerted by market
integration” [Guyer 2004:123].
She found there was a dual shift in budgeting over these two decades: a
decrease in life-cycle ceremonial contributions (funerals, marriage,
apprenticeship freedom ceremonies) and an increase in agricultural expenses,
and that rites of passage had become “streamlined”, occurring only
on the weekends, while the bulk of the financial burden came to rest on the
central celebrant.
|
Farming household budgets, Idere, Nigeria |
||
|
|
Percentage
of Expenditure |
|
|
|
1969 |
1988 |
|
Living expenses, Total |
28% |
34% |
|
Food, household items |
13% |
21% |
|
Clothes |
9% |
2% |
|
Medical |
1% |
5% |
|
Travel |
2% |
5% |
|
Other |
3% |
1% |
|
Lifetime assets, Total |
18% |
11% |
|
Building |
10% |
1% |
|
Schooling |
8% |
10% |
|
Social membership, Total |
48% |
17% |
|
Ceremonies/gifts |
35% |
11% |
|
Associations |
5% |
3% |
|
Credit associatoins |
8% |
3% |
|
Production, Total |
6% |
38% |
|
Farm inputs |
2% |
1% |
|
Hired labour (cash) |
4% |
3% |
|
Hired labour (debt) |
0% |
23% |
|
Tractor hire |
n/a |
11% |
Source: Guyer, Jane I.
(2004). Marginal Gains: Monetary
Transactions in Atlantic Africa,
Recently
the economist Brank Milanovic has published global income inequality data for
the period from 1820 to 2000; when weighting between-country by their
populations, income inequality increased from a Gini index of
Nigerian Views on Cultural Change
Civil society groups have the capability of
influencing popular opinion, and thereby, effecting political change. Perhaps the most successful example of
this is
The following extracts suggest that
intergenerational shifts in Nigerian attitudes may in fact be changing rapidly.
Ibhawoh, Bonny (2000). “Between
Culture and Constitution: Evaluating the Cultural Legitimacy of Human Rights in
the
Ibhawoh is a Nigerian from
p. 849-850
“Social anthropologists have long identified the ambivalence of
cultural norms and their susceptibility to different interpretation as one of
the defining features of culture.
Typically, dominant groups or classes within a society seek to maintain
perceptions and interpretations of cultural values and norms that are
supportive of their own interests, proclaiming them to be the only valid view
of that culture. Such powerful
groups and individuals tend to monopolize the interpretations of cultural norms
and manipulate them to their advantage. In contrast, dominated groups or classes
may hold, or at least be open to, different perceptions and interpretations
that are helpful to their struggle for control for justice and improvements for
themselves. This type of
internal struggle for control over cultural sources and symbols can be said to
underline the contemporary discourse on the cultural legitimacy of human rights
in Africa.”
p. 850 “On the one hand, there are the
male-dominated, urban-based elites whose perception of ‘cultural
legitimacy’ focuses on the idealized African traditions of
collectivism, definitive gender roles, and conservative male dominance and
interpretation of moral values… I will call this the ‘conservative
paradigm’ of cultural legitimacy… On the other hand, there are
emerging and increasingly vocal groups, represented mainly by women groups
and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) working for women and minority
rights… they use the global human rights debate in criticizing present
cultural practices which infringe human rights… the ‘dynamic
paradigm’ of cultural legitimacy.”
p. 854 “[A]t the core of this apparent conflict
between the paradigms of cultural legitimacy is the fact that the realities of
present day African societies, particularly in the urban areas, are
characterized by destabilization and breakdown (without effective alternatives)
of traditional models of rights and support in the family… The dilemma of
the African state today is that the community and extended family are no longer
able to play their social welfare roles, while the state is not yet able to
replace them in doing this. Put
differently, cultures are no longer able and constitutions are not yet able.” [Emphasis added]
http://www.codesria.org/Links/Publications/ad3_004/faniran%20_adeboyejo.pdf
Adetoye Faniran (
“The Challenge of the Participatory
Approach to Rural Poverty Alleviation: The Example of Olugbena Group of
Villages, Ewekoro,
Africa Development/Afrique et Développement Vol. XXIX,
No. 3, 2004, p.58-69.
Abstract
This paper draws from the experiences of a
Non-Governmental Organisation, Man and Nature Study/Action Centre
(MANASC)—concerning a rural development project being undertaken in
Olugbena, a group of six villages in Ewekoro Local Government of Ogun State,
Nigeria—to highlight the challenges of participatory rural development in
p. 81 (Conclusion): “One possible explanation of
the negative attitude of the people to participatory development is the
apparent breakdown of the communal spirit and tradition under the combined
onslaught of ‘modernisation’ and capitalism. Individualism and
personal gain have replaced communalism and community interest respectively in
the urbanised forest communities… The interest among the people is
how much money they can obtain quickly from it; any project that will not
provide it is not relevant to the people’s life.” (italics added)
While 10,425
Nigerians resided in Canada in 2000, of whom 4,545 arrived between 1996 and
2001, and 1,575 were temporary residents [2001 Census, Immigrant
Status and Period of Immigration (10A) and Place of Birth of Respondent (260)]
and although the Canadian presence in Nigeria is relatively small – about
1,200 citizens in 1999, according to an interview with then-Canadian High
Commissioner Ian Ferguson [Huang 1999]
- Canada's moral support for human rights there has been long and
sustained. After having supervised the construction of railways in the Sudan
and South Africa, the Montreal-born military engineer Sir
Percy Girouard was appointed in 1907 by Winston Churchill, then
Britain’s Under-Secretary for State for the colonies, to oversee the
construction of Nigeria’s railway system and succeeded Lord Lugard as
High Commissioner and Commander-in-Chief; he spent two years as Governor of the
Protectorate of Northern Nigeria, during which time he oversaw the location and
reconnaissance surveys of
BACKGROUND
The 21st-century’s
“Scramble for
‘There are in Africa none of those great inlets,
the Baltic and Adriatic Seas in Europe, the Mediterranean and Euxine [Black]
seas in both Europe and Asia, and the gulphs of Arabia, Persia, India, Bengal
and Siam in Asia to carry maritime commerce into the interior parts of that
great continent: and the great rivers of Africa are too great a distance from
one another to give occasion to any considerable inland navigation.’
[Adam Smith (1776) An Inquiry Into the
Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Chapter 3, final paragraph].
Grassroots
development workers are conscious of the fundamental need in their work for
making attitudinal (and, ultimately
behavioural) changes in stakeholders in both the North and the South
[Fowler 1997]. Are the practices of
development and social justice, fundamentally, about behaviour modification, transforming
people into the Global Economic Order, expanding opportunities in
people’s lives, and changing ways of thinking one brain at a time? If so, how can cultural values
transmitted from one generation to the next impede or encourage
development? In the trajectory of
world development, did
The
“happy natives” pre-colonial paradise fallacy has been debunked by
many including John Reader’s extensive review in which he asserts that,
owing to “unpredictable climatic conditions, arduous envionrmental
circumstances, and endemic disease that restrained population
growth”, “[t]he poor,
whom the Merrie Africa scenario presumes never to have existed in pre-colonial
Africa, were a conspicuous feature of African society when the Portuguese
established Europe’s first direct contacts with Africa in the early 1500s
[Reader 1997:313,314], and more recently by Daniel Jordan Smith, a social
anthropologist at Brown University in Rhode Island. Brown happens to be married to an Igbo
woman whom he first met while working for an international NGO in
‘The reality of
Modernisation
theory may not necessarily imply the wholesale forfeit of traditional values
for Euro-American ones – values which have evolved gradually over the
past two centuries of industrialisation, urbanisation et cet. Some have suggested that, out of calculated
self-interest, citizens and governments in the south may conform in
behavior to expectations in the north in order to serve their own interests
(Windsor, Duane; Getz, Kathleen A. (2000). “Multilateral Cooperation to
Combat Corruption: Normative Regimes Despite Mixed Motives and Diverse
Values”, Cornell International Law Journal 33(3):731-772). Hence, the goal may be functional
equivalence, as opposed to “brain-washing” or “ethical
laundering”. The analysis of
recent attitudinal surveys may help us to identify signs of any
value/behavioural convergence between North and South.
Disorienting, Dis-occidenting, Diss Africa-ning
Postcolonialism
guru Edward Said wrote of the cognitive dissonance that Joseph Conrad's
narrator, Marlow in Heart of Darkness,
(and indeed Conrad himself) encountered in the Belgian Congo during the 1890s (Culture and Imperialism.
Yet the whole point of what Kurtz and Marlow talk
about is in fact imperial mastery, white European over black Africans, and their ivory, civilization over the primitive dark continent. By accentuating the discrepancy between
the official “idea” of empire and the remarkably disorienting actuality of
Eight
decades after Conrad, the Ghanaian writer Ama Ata Aidoo related her reverse
voyage into
She was somewhat puzzled.
Black girl?
Black girl?
So she looked around her really well this time.
And it hit her.
That all the crowd of people going and coming in all sorts of directions
had the colour of the pickled pig parts that used to come from foreign places
to the markets at home.
Trotters, pig-tails, pig-ears.
She looked and looked at so many of such skins
together.
And she wanted to vomit.
Then she was ashamed of her reaction.
Something pulled inside her.
For the rest of her life, she was to regret this
moment when she was made to notice differences in human colouring.
In
antidote to Conrad’s character navigating his steamship up the
treacherously uncharted waters to Stanleyville, Aidoo’s character Sissie
was profoundly disoccidented among
these colour-conscious Germans [Hildegard Hoeller “Ama Ata Aidoo's Heart
of Darkness,” Research in African
Literatures, Spring 2004, 35(1):130].
So, how
much has the values chasm filled or deepened in the intervening quarter of a
century? Do high income
countries’ residents and Africans' worldviews, their articulations of
being, their ways of thinking about their lives still oppose each other as
starkly as the colours white and black?
The short answer seems to be “yes”, but then,
Negative
impressions of sub-Saharan
“The reason that [Western journalists] report
that Africa is plagued by war, famine, and pestilence is that
Can an
attitudinal poll of the citizens of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, with her
fabled 283 different languages and geographic diversity from steamy mangrove
swamp to arid
How can
the 2000 "World Values Survey" declare that Nigerians’
subjective well-being (“"taking all things together, would you say
you are very happy, quite happy, not very happy, or not at all happy" ) is
the highest globally? When
their country ranked 151st out of 177 nations on the UNDP's 2004 "Human
Development Index", with a value of 0.466 out of a range from 0.273
(Sierra Leone) up to 0.956 (Norway) that is just 29% of the range. Does it all have to do with disparities
in personal and state monetary wealth, or are there subtler factors at
work? Can these differences in
values, and how they have changed over time inform the work of expatriate-based
international development agencies collaborating with Nigerian groups for
social change? Is “social
development” all about changing people’s values, behavioural
modification, social re-engineering… so that the Southern
“partners” become more like individualistic, self-maximising
Westerners?
If, as a
page on the Canadian
Trade Commissioner website suggests, there is “physical and
psychological distance” between Nigeria and Canada that presents a
“challenge” and “problems” for Canada’s export of
tangible goods to Nigeria, is there also a “challenge” for
Canadians working as social change agents with NGOs in Nigeria?
DOMESTIC
AND INTERNATIONAL POLLING/SURVEY DATA
http://einstein.library.emory.edu/courses/ps309_S05.html
http://www.afrobarometer.org/
The Afrobarometers are a series of surveys conducted across a
dozen Sub-Saharan African countries with the intent of gathering data on social
and political attitudes towards subjects such as political participation,
national identity, civil society, and other such topics. The series is modelled
in part after the Eurobarometer series (see below). The
International Social Survey Programme
(ISSP)
http://www.issp.org/homepage.htm
The ISSP is an ongoing effort devoted to cross-national research
on social attitudes. In addition to asking general questions about attitudes
towards various social issues, the ISSP series also includes special topic
modules focusing on matters such as national idenitity, the role of government,
and gender roles. The
ISSP 1999 - "Social Inequality III" surveys only 28 countries in OECD & E. Europe &
Philippines. Ditto for ISSP 2001 -
"Social Networks II" - ZA No. 3680.
World Values Surveys, 1990 & 2000
http://www.democ.uci.edu/resources/virtuallibrary/wvs.pdf
“World
Values Surveys and European Values Surveys, Cumulative for the First Three
Waves”) p. 104-5. V234:
Region Codes for
Three
recent, cross-national, face-to-face surveys of lifestyles, personality traits,
attitudes and emotions have included significant contingents of Nigerians:
Pulse of
Africa A pan-African survey done for the BBC in 2004 (7,700
respondents in ten Anglo-African countries including
The Pew
Research Center’s Pew Global
Attitudes Project (interviews with 1,000 Nigerians conducted in May
2003, as well as 65,000 other respondents from nine African nations and 40
other nations on every continent in 2002 and 2003) and
The
latest in a two-decade old series of World Values Surveys (WVS)
that has included 1,000 Nigerians and 2,500 South Africans may begin to unravel
some of these paradoxes. In the
1990 poll (summarised in Inglehart, Ronald Human
Values and Beliefs: A Cross-Cultural Sourcebook: Political, Religious, Sexual,
and Economic Norms in 43 Societies: Findings from the 1990—1993 Word Values
Survey,” University of Michigan Press, 1998), 939 Nigerians (1,001 Nigerians on p.63) were surveyed by the
Nigerian arm of the Gallup poll firm, Research and Marketing Services, Ltd.,
headed by Kareem Tejumola in Lagos (p. 469), in collaboration with WVS's
principal investigator and University of Michigan sociologist, Ronald
Inglehart. Two African nations were
surveyed both in 1990 and 2000,
The Nigerian sample size for the third wave (fall, 1995) of the WVS was 2,769,
while the “fourth wave” of the WVS, conducted in the fall of 2000
by Bukola Bandele (RMS Media Services), surveyed a total of 2,022
Nigerians.
http://www.columbia.edu/acis/eds/dgate/pdf/C6149-4.wvs4.pdf
ICPSR
3975: User Guide and Codebook. p.
12 of 109:
These surveys cover a broader range of variation than has ever before
been available for
analyzing the belief systems of mass publics. They provide data from representative national
samples of the publics of 81
societies containing 85 percent of the world's population and covering the full
range of variation, from societies with per capita incomes below $300 per year,
to societies with per capita incomes of more than $35,000 per year; from long-established democracies to
authoritarian states; and from societies with market economies to societies
that are in the process of emerging from state-run economies. They cover
societies that were historically shaped by a wide variety of religious and
cultural traditions, from Christian to Islamic to Confucian to Hindu; and from
societies whose culture emphasizes social conformity and group-obligations, to
societies where the main emphasis is on human emancipation and self-expression.
To date,
four “waves” of the WVS surveys have been conducted (1980, 1990,
1995 and 2000; the 2005 wave is underway).
The 2000 WVS used the same
Inglehart
has collapsed 18 of the WVS responses into a single variable which places
societies along a “pre-materialist”/ materialist /
“post-materialist” axis.
The mechanistic aggregating methodology of Ingelhart’s WVS series
has been criticised by cultural anthropologists who focus on particularist
analysis. Can the responses of
1,000 Chinese and 2,500 Indians accurately reflect the voices of those
countries’ one billion citizens each? Low sampling sizes were justified since
“obtaining random probability samples from them would have required far
more funding than was available for this project. We accorded a high priority to including
such societies as
With all
its faults, the WVS series offers a rich source of Nigerian values stratified
by time (1990, 1995, 2000), religion (Christian, Islam), age, education and
income. For sociologists attempting
to understand value differences between Christians and Muslims,
Some Basic Socio-economic Contrasts: Canadians and Nigerians
|
|
|
|
Comments |
|
Human
Development Index rank, 2003 (1 = highest ; 177 = lowest) |
5 |
158 |
|
|
Life
expectancy at birth, 2000-2005 (years) (2) |
79.9 |
43.3 |
In
1996, for |
|
Mortality
rate, 2001, per 1,000 population (11) |
7.2 |
19.4 |
|
|
Infant
mortality rate, 2001 (deaths per 1,000 live births) (3) |
5 |
98 |
|
|
Total
fertility rate (births per woman, 2000-2005) (4) |
1.5 |
5.8 |
|
|
Abortions,
per 1,000 women aged 15-44 (5) |
15.5 |
25.4 |
Estimates
by region of |
|
Unemployment
rate, 2003 (6) |
7.6% |
14.8% |
Afrobarometer
survey, 2001: 20% ("currently without a job but actively looking") (8) |
|
Income
per capita, Purchasing Power Parity, 2003, US$ |
$30,677 |
$1,050 |
|
|
Total
water withdrawal per capita, |
1,470. |
66.25 |
Water
withdrawal by sector: |
|
GDP
per capita annual growth rate, 1990-2003 |
2.30% |
0.00% |
While
the “average” Nigerian has seen no change in their income in
nearly a decade and a half, Sala-i-Martin found that the income held by the
wealthiest 2 percent rose from that equal to the poorest 17% in 1970 to the
poorest 55% in 2000 (Sala-i-Martin, 2003:4). (9) |
|
Ratio
of income, richest 20% to poorest 20% |
5.8 |
12.8 |
|
|
%
of population undernourished, 2000/2002 (7) |
not available |
9% |
15%
of Canadian households estimated to have either lacked or worried about
insufficient food at some point in 2000/01. (6) |
|
Urban
population, 2003 (% of total) |
80.3% |
46.6% |
|
Sources
(1) Unless otherwise stated, data are from: UNDP (2005). Human Development Report, (various
tables).
(2) Statistics
(3) Statistics
(4) Statistics
(5) Henshaw, Stanley K. et al. (1999). The Incidence of Abortion Worldwide, International
Family Planning Perspectives 25, Supplement. Regional Nigerian data: International Family Planning Perspectives
1998, 24(4):156-164. http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/journals/25s3099.html
(6) Federal Government of Nigeria, National Bureau of
Statistics, Unemployment Rates from
1999-2004, http://www.bosng.org/nbsdata/Unemployment_Rate_All_Datagraph.pdf
(7) Statistics
(8) Lewis, Peter; Alemika, Etannibi; Bratton, Michael
(2002). “Down
To Earth: Changes In Attitudes Toward Democracy And Markets In Nigeria,” Afrobarometer
Paper No. 20,
(9) Sala-i-Martin, Xavier; Subramanian, Arvind (2003). “Addressing The Natural Resource
Curse: An Illustration From
(10) Fogel, Robert William (2005). The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700-2100: Europe, America,
and the Third World,
(11) United Nations. Population Division of the Department of
Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations Secretariat, World Population Prospects: The 2004
Revision, http://esa.un.org/unpp, 20 April 2006; 11:18:31 AM.
(12) Fogel, Robert William (2000). The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism,
Chicago: The
(13) Maddison, A. (2004), "When and Why did the West get
Richer than the Rest?", in Exploring
Economic Growth: Festschrift for Riitta Hjerppe, Aksant,
(14) Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations
(FAO) Aquastat Online Database,
Accessed 13 June, 2006. http://www.fao.org/ag/agl/aglw/aquastat/dbase/index.stm
Canadian
exports to Nigeria in 2004 amounted to Cdn. $81 million (principally wheat,
telecommunications, oil and gas equipment and pharmaceuticals), while Nigerian
exports to Canada fell from $442 million in 2003 ($412 m. of which was crude
oil) to $94 million in 2004 ($38 m. of which, crude oil, the remainder
primarily cocoa beans) [International
Trade Canada 2005].
Compared
to
In terms
of income inequality among their citizens, the United Nations Development
Program’s Human Development Report for 2005 ranked
Canada 36th-most egalitarian and Nigeria 104th-most
egalitarian among 124 nations, as measured by its Gini index; the Gini ranges
from zero, representing perfect income equality (all citizens have exactly the
same income or assets) and up to one, representing perfect income inequality
(one citizen has all the income, while the others have nothing). Twenty-seven of the 35 nations with Gini
indices lower (more equitable) than
|
Country |
Survey Year |
Share of Income or
Consumption |
Ratios |
Gini Index |
||||
|
Poorest 10% |
Poorest 20% |
Richest 20% |
Richest 10% |
Richest : Poorest 10% |
Richest : Poorest 20% |
|||
|
|
1998 |
2.5% |
7.0% |
40.4% |
25.0% |
10.1 |
5.8 |
33.1 |
|
|
1996 |
1.6% |
4.4% |
55.7% |
40.8% |
24.9 |
12.8 |
50.6 |
|
Maximum |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Minimum |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Notes
(1)
Namibia 78.7 Botswana 70.3 Lesotho 66.5 Central African Republic 65.0 Guatemala
64.1 Sierra Leone 63.4 Brazil 63.2 Chile 62.2 South Africa 62.2 Colombia 61.8
Burkina Faso 60.7 Mexico 59.1 Zambia 56.6 Argentina 56.4 Mali 56.2
(2)
Namibia: 70.7, Lesotho 63.2, Botswana 63.0, Sierra Leone 62.9, Central African
Republic 61.3, Swaziland 60.9, South Africa 57.8, Zimbabwe 56.8, Zambia 52.6
(3)
S.Korea 37.5, Albania 37.4, Finland 36.7, Uzbekistan 36.3, Czech R. 35.9,
Bosnia & Herzegovina 35.8, Denmark 35.8, Japan 35.7, Slovenia 35.7,
Slovakia 34.8
(4)
Ghana 40.8 USA 40.8 UK 36.0 Canada 33.0 France 32.7 India 32.5 ...Germany 28.3
Hungary 26.9 Bosnia & Herz. 26.2 Slovakia 25.8 Norway 25.8 Czech 25.4
Belgium 25.0 Sweden 25.0 Japan 24.9 Denmark 24.7
The plot of human life expectancy versus income per capita is curvilinear
in shape, with an initial sharp slope for low life-expectancy populations below
65 years, followed by a rapid flattening of the relationship above this
age. It is important to note that
there are six outliers from this curve, all middle-human development countries
in southern Africa that have been most heavily stricken by the AIDS pandemic:
Botswana, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Namibia, South Africa and Swaziland, and
they have been excluded from the following analysis.
Source: Compiled from UNDP 2005:Tables 5 & 10. Income is
expressed in terms of purchasing power parity (PPP). South
Africa and Equatorial Guinea are among the outliers, due to the extent that the
HIV pandemic has attenuated life expectancies.
Based on a UNDP sample of 159 national averages, comprising 96% of the
global population, thirty-five per
cent of human beings could, in statistical terms, expect to live less than 65
years if they were born in 2000-2005, 49% would live between 65 and 74 years,
while the remaining 16% could expect to live between 75 and 82 years. Using linear regression, it is possible
to predict the following relationships for each of these three age ranges:
|
|
Correlation
Coefficient |
Slope |
Ordinate |
For every extra dollar
earned, how much longer life? (Hours) |
Extra income required
to live one year longer? |
|
64 yrs and less * |
0.449 |
0.003225 |
46.032 |
28.250 |
$310 |
|
65-75 yrs, all |
0.451 |
0.000291 |
68.927 |
2.550 |
$3,435 |
|
76 yrs and above, all |
0.333 |
0.000052 |
77.273 |
0.453 |
$19,319 |
Source: Calculated from from
UNDP 2005:Tables
5 & 10. * For these
calculations, the “64 years and less” country group excludes six
outliers (
Therefore, a Nigerian who raises her income by just one dollar per year can
roughly expect her lifespan (or more properly, the lifespan of her infant born
in 2003) to be extended about 28 hours longer than the mean life expectancy;
she would have to increase her income from the average of $1,050 to $1,360
(30%) in order to extend life by one extra year. By contrast, the average Canadian with
one extra dollar of income could statistically expect his child to live only an
extra half-hour greater than the average, and if he would like to increase the
life expectancy by one year, he would have to earn 63% extra, or $19,319 more
than the Canadian average of US$30,677!
In fact, the relationship between income and life expectancy is quite
weak among the high income nations: Uruguayans,
whose infants can expect to live to 75.3 years, earn only $8,280 per year, whilst
American infants can expect to live only two years longer, to 77.3 years, but
their parents’ incomes are $37,562. The correlation coefficient is twice as
strong, twice as reliable a predictor, for the three-quarters of humanity that
can expect to live only to age 74.
This illustrates the dramatic impact that small increments in personal
wealth can make on citizens’ fundamental right to life. With a life expectancy at birth of 43.3
years in 2000, Nigerians presently fall among the shortest-living 3.5% of
humanity; only ten nations – eight in southern Africa - have shorter life
expectancies.
CHARACTERISING CANADIANS
According
to the sociologist and Environics pollster, Michael Adams, Canadians are quite
distinct in their social values when compared to Americans. Based on an analysis of survey responses
made by 6,245 Americans and 8,168 Canadians aged 15+ to 101 questions, and
their statistical aggregation into two independent dimensions, Adams produced the
following graph, showing that only the residents of the northeastern American
region of New England demonstrate similar orientations in terms of their
individuality (rejection of traditional authority) and their desire for what he
calls “fulfillment” (the desire for personal control, a global consciousness,
and tolerance for differing points of view).
Source: Adams, Michael, Fire and Ice: The
Status & Security: Obedience to
Traditional Structures and Norms
Authenticity & Responsibility: Well-being, Harmony and
Responsibility
Exclusion & Intensity: Seeking Stimulus and Attention
Idealism & Autonomy: Exploration and Flexibility
Despite Quebec occupying the most extreme corner
of Adams’s socio-cultural map – lending quantitative support for
this province being a “distinct society” in more ways that simply
linguistic terms - the fertility rate is only the national average, 1.5
children per woman aged 15-49. This
may reflect
However, the more
conservative/authoritarian provinces do have the highest fertility rates:
Quebeckers have the highest percentage of
divorced persons in the country, 6.02% out of the total provincial population,
compared to the national average of 4.89% in 2005 [Statistics Canada, Population by marital
status and sex, by province and territory, 2005]. Atlantic Canada,
Canadians’ Volunteer Participation in Global Social Justice
Canadians’
self-reported membership in “Third world development or human
rights” organisations has remained constant at about 4.6% between 1990
and 2000, according to two polls conducted by the World Values Survey [Question
A070]. For a sample of eight high-income
nations, membership in these organisations grew 1.7% over the last decade.
Source: World Values Survey, 1990 and 2000,
Question A070 (no data for
When stratifying the Canadian responses for
2000, one finds that there is a strong correlation between level of educational
attainment and world development-related affiliation, but a much weaker
correlation for age, or income level:
|
Canadians’ Membership in 3rd World Organisations in
2000 by Educational Attainment, Age and Income Level |
|||||||
|
Incomplete Elementary |
Elementary |
Incomplete Secondary: Vocational |
Secondary: vocational |
Incomplete Secondary: Academic |
Secondary: academic |
Incomplete University or other Tertiary |
University or other Tertiary |
|
3.4% |
4.6% |
3.0% |
3.2% |
3.3% |
3.1% |
5.3% |
9.5% |
|
Age |
Income Level |
||||
|
15-29 |
30-49 |
50+ |
Low |
Middle |
High |
|
2.4% |
4.8% |
5.1% |
3.1% |
6.0% |
5.8% |
Source: World Values Survey, 1990 and
2000, Question A070/V45.
These response data suggest that, for
Canadians, support for global social justice issues as demonstrated by
volunteer membership is most strongly influenced by completion of a university
education: membership triples from 3.1%
for Canadians having completed secondary school to 9.5% for university
graduates. Whether a Canadian
is in the middle or high income group, they are twice as likely to belong to
global justice organisations (6%) than those in the low income group; and being
over the age of 30 doubles membership in these organisations.
In 1990, 2.7% of Canadians reported doing
unpaid volunteer work for third world development and human rights
organisations, while in 2000, the proportion had fallen slightly to 2.4%;
thus, about 60% of those who reported
“belonging” to such groups also report active volunteer work. As for “belonging”,
“volunteer work” increases most with a university education, 5.2%
versus just 1.2% for those whose highest education is secondary school (World Values Survey 2000:A087/V60).
Canadians’ Support for International Development Aid
In response to the 2000 World Values Survey
question, “Some people favor, and others are against, having this country
provide economic aid to poorer countries. Do you think that this country should
provide more or less economic aid to poorer countries?”, 54% of Canadians
overall either gave the response “A lot more than we do now” or
“Somewhat more than we do now”. A university degree increased support
for increased foreign aid by a ratio of 32%, from 55% for those whose highest
education was a secondary school diploma, to 72% for university graduates:
|
Should |
|||||||
|
Incomplete
Elementary |
Elementary |
Incomplete
Secondary: Vocational |
Secondary:
vocational |
Incomplete
Secondary: Academic |
Secondary:
academic |
Incomplete
University or other Tertiary |
University
or other Tertiary |
|
34.6% |
46.9% |
43.3% |
52.2% |
50.9% |
54.8% |
56.8% |
72.3% |
|
Age |
Income Level |
||||
|
15-29 |
30-49 |
50+ |
Low |
Middle |
High |
|
64.7% |
53.0% |
49.8% |
50.5% |
49.7% |
64.0% |
Source: World Values Survey, 1990 and
2000, Question E129 (V176).
Opoku-Dapnah (2002) carried out face-to-face
interviews with 50 Canadians in
A team of political scientists at the
Université de Montréal and the
Based on a survey of 14 volunteer-sending
agencies published on the Canadian Centre for International
Co-operation’s website, in
2004/05, CIDA funded about 3,300 Canadians who were working abroad as
volunteers and/or in the field of international development. Many of them are working neither in
emergency humanitarian relief, nor as technical advisors for large physical
infrastructure projects, but rather in the area of soft development,
i.e. social transformation, assisting the voiceless and excluded in societies
in the South. Essentially, their
work involves changing how people think – both the powerless and
the powerful. It is therefore
necessary for both the expatriate and the host organisation to know what is the
tacit social knowledge, innate cultural biases, implicit mutual understanding,
core values and worldview that governs how people think and act (Volunteers
CIDA funded 2004-2005, referring to Canadians overseas as volunteers, experts,
youth exchanges, and/or technical advisors, in areas related to governance.
AFS 20, CCI 70+76, JCM 1027, SACO 297+162+40+96+8, SUCO 19, VSO 70-80 (11
CIDA), CUSO 248+19, Oxfam Quebec 100+13+36, CECI/WUSC 17+73+191+6+24+10, CANADEM
116+23+16+56+2, Terre sans
frontiere 1+16+15+3+1+1, World
Vision Canada 6 (over last 5 yrs), Christian Children`s Fund of Canada CCFC 4
(over 5 yrs), AUCC 2+4+4+3+5+4+1+3+4+3+4+322+12 TOTAL = 3,258.) [http://www.ccic.ca/e/docs/002_cda_corps_mapping.pdf MAPPING –
Unlike the short-term technical advisors who
may have only limited interactions with the host culture, CUSO cooperants in
particular are enthusiastic, results-oriented, pro-egalitarian “global
citizens” who are embedded, face-to-face, with a small group of their
host counterparts in the South for a minimum of two years.
Coming closer to
characterising persons who work in volunteer-sending agencies such as CUSO,
Keith Child and Carly Manion surveyed 97 undergraduates and 20 graduate
students in six Canadian university international development studies
(IDS) programs (Dalhousie, Saint Mary's, McGill, Queen's, Trent and Calgary)
and found that 53% of the undergrads chose IDS primarily for "humanitarian
social justice" reasons and 24% because they liked "overseas
travel/intercultural experience", whereas for graduate students, the
percentages were 15% and 30% respectively. They found that "[a]mong
undergraduates (domestic and foreign) their views of development... were much
more cynical and pessimistic about the future" while cynicism was
"largely absent" for the graduate students (2004:183). Twenty-five percent of IDS graduate students in their
survey were international students from developing countries who said they
intended to repatriate and work on the country's development. Canadian-born
students chose development studies as their major for the following reasons:
“Humanitarian (social justice, etc.)”: 53%, “Overseas travel
/ intercultural experience”: 24% while for foreign students, 32% each expressed
these reasons [Child and Manion 2004].
The more or less equal divide among Canadians in supporting wealth redistribution, both nationally and internationally, may reflect two streams of Canadian political thought in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through its Protestant and especially evangelical-rooted idealism and belief in a benevolent God, the Social Gospel movement addressed the growing social problems of materialism, corruption and inequality in the 1880s and 1890s, promoting the modern values of liberal progressivism and social justice; it is claimed that this movement gave birth to the academic disciplines of social ethics and sociology in Canadian universities, and that its heirs were the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, and the contemporary support for social welfare, Canadian peacekeeping, and related causes [Allen 2006]. The other stream, the Social Credit movement evolved in the 1930s from the support of the Albertan and evangelical minister William Aberhart, eventually promoting conservative social and financial policies [Morley 2006].
FLUX AND
STASIS IN NIGERIA
Reasons to expect stasis in Nigerian attitudes and behaviours between 1990 and 2000
Declining life expectancy: The
UN Population Division estimates that Nigerian life expectancy peaked during
the period 1985-1990, reaching 46.6 years at time of birth; it then fell to
44.5 during 1995-2000, and is expected to descend to 43.3 years in 2000-2005
before it returns upwards, largely a result of the AIDS pandemic [World Population Prospects: The
2004 Revision Population Database, Detailed Data]. Over the same period, Western European
life expectancy rose steadily, from 75.6 years in the latter half if the 1980s
to
Zero economic growth: the
aggregate annual change in GDP per capita has averaged around 0.0% (on the
whole, no major increase or decrease in wealth for the average Nigerian, while
the population grew 2.8% per year).
The World Bank estimates the Nigerian GNI per capita increased by 0.3%
per year from 1990-2002 [African
Development Indicators 2004:Table 1-1, p.5].
No reductions in under-five mortality rates, nor in maternal
mortality ratios. The reduction of under-five mortality
rates (UN Millennium Development Goal Nr. 4) was only 4% between 1990 to 2001,
placing the target of a 67% reduction by 2015 very far off [Human
Development Report 2003, Table
3].
Signifiers of social change under macro-economic stasis
Electoral, multi-party democracy. The advent of a civilian regime in 1999,
following 13 years of progressively rapacious military rule has brought
opportunities for increased freedom of expression and social mobilisation.
NGOisation, privatisation and divestiture of publicly-owned
social services. The imposition of “user
fees” and/or petty bribes in state-owned hospitals, as well as the
emergence of private medical clinics, private schools and universities, and
non-governmental organisations involved in activities ranging from financial
lending to low-income individuals to the supply of HIV antiretroviral
medication. With roughly 75 public
enterprises and parastatals up for full or partial commercialisation, the
Economist Intelligence Unit noted in 2004 that “[u]nder the original
plan, the entire privatisation agenda was to have been finished by 2003, but by
April none of
Dawning of microfinance for the poor. Microcredit Microfinance Institutions in
Nigeria: Policy, Practice and Potentials C. M. Anyanwu Deputy Director
Central Bank of Nigeria, Abuja, Nigeria November, 2004 Paper Presented at the
G24 Workshop on “Constraints to Growth in Sub Saharan Africa,”
Pretoria, South Africa, November 29-30, 2004 http://www.g24.org/anyanwu.pdf. p.3: “The number of MFI
[Microfinance institutions] branches increased five fold and the employees ten
times. Their asset base and clients rose six and sixty-seven times,
respectively. The value of outstanding loans and savings increased in
multiples. Yet the number of beneficiaries of MFI operators is an insignificant
proportion of over 60 million people that are in need of microfinance
services.” "The number of borrowers from the ten MFIs rose over
sixty-seven times, from
A bifurcation of the income distribution.
Declining fertility rates. Consistent with other areas of the
developing world, there has been a concomitant drop in the number of children
borne per woman and in population growth.
The population growth rate averaged 2.7% per year between 1993 and 2002
[World
Bank, African
Development Indicators, 2004,
Declining Antenatal Care and Attended Birth Deliveries. The United Nations
Population Fund estimates that Nigerians suffered a setback in the proportion of mothers having at least one antenatal
care visit (64% in 1990, 58% in “most recent” period) and having a
skilled attendant present at the time of birth (45% vs. 42%). By comparison, Ghana and Burkina Faso
had increases in antenatal care from 65% to 88% and 49% to 62%, respectively
while their attended birth rates also remained constant around 30%-40%. [UNFPA, Compare Country Indicators].
Growing urbanisation.
Increasing educational attainment and low national adult
illiteracy.
Oxfam reports that gross primary school enrolment is 80.7% [Measuring
Poverty in Nigeria, 2003: 19]. Data from UNESCO
show that
Religious polarisation: “Personalised” Christian
Evangelical churches; Shari’a Criminal Law. Prosperity
religion, the Pentecostalist faith, and numerous weekend crusades are changing
people’s behaviour, placing greater emphasis on Western-style
individualism and the nuclear family [Meyer, Birgit Translating the Devil.
Religion and Modernity among the Ewe in
Nollywood. In spite of flat per capita economic
performance,
Six per cent annual growth in principle food crops production. Data aggregated
from the World Bank for volume of food output (yam, cassava, sorghum, millet,
rice, palm oil, et cet.) over the
period 1990 to 2000 show an annual average increase in production of 6.1% [African
Development Indicators, 2004, Washington D.C.,
Table 8-6, p.222-225]. This is
double the rate in growth of the human population!
Rainforest coverage reductions. Deforestation is occurring at a rate of
about 0.5% of
Remittances of Nigerians working abroad grew 38% per year over
the 1990s, reaching $2 bn. in 2000. Based
solely upon “worker remittances which enter the official banking
system”, expatriate Nigerians sent home to their families and communities
$12 million in 1990 [R. Adams, World
Bank Policy Research Working Paper 3069, 2003: 23] and this increased
steadily to an estimated $1.80 billion US in 2001 [IMF Country
Report No. 03/60, 2003:143, “Private transfers (net)”],
attaining about 4% of Nigeria’s GNP, and dwarfing by one order of
magnitude the country’s official development assistance receipts from the
OECD of $185 million in 2001. As
such, Nigerians’ home remittance in 2000 ranked about sixth-highest among
24 migrant-economy countries, after India, Mexico, Turkey, Egypt and Morocco
[Adams 2003:23-24].
Capital flight is about double the annual remittances. Alas,
about twice as much privately-owned money escapes the country than
returns. Between 1990 and 1996,
private outflows from
Nigeria
Source: United Nations, Human
Development Report 2003:54.
It performed this despite complete stasis in
its aggregate per capita income from
1990 to 2001 (and indeed to 2005) – this attests as much to the
extraordinary resourcefulness and ingenuity of its people as the fertility of
Nigerian soil:
Source: United Nations, Human
Development Report 2003:53
The second UN Millennium
Development Goal is to “achieve universal primary education” by
2015. According to UNESCO
data last updated in May 2005,
Economist Intelligence Unit (2004). Country Commerce:
p. 37: "The official unemployment rate is consistently reported to be around
5%, but this conceals far higher rates in the cities and high underemployment
in rural areas. Unofficial rates estimate unemployment at closer to 40%. But
few reliable figures are available. The National Manpower Board estimates that
about 6m Nigerian graduates were unemployed in 2000."
p.37-8: "The country also continues to
suffer from an incurable brain drain with the best talent leaving home for
developed countries with better wages and living conditions. Many emigrants
leave as students and do not returned after finishing their studies
abroad. Statistics show that there
are about 250,000 Nigerians living in the
Estimates of youth unemployment in
Within-Nigeria Variability in Social Indicators
The World Bank economist Branko Milanovic
has found that
Income Inequality in
Gini
Coefficients in
Source: Milanovic, Branko
(2003). Is inequality in
Many sub-Saharan African nations are close
to Nigeria’s level of within-country income inequality (50.6) and
Nigeria’s GDP per capita ($1,050), including (Gini Index from 1993-2002,
GDP per capita, PPP $US, 2003): Burkina Faso (48.2, $1,174), Madagascar (47.5,
$809), Malawi (50.3, $605), Mali (50.5, $994), and Zambia (52.6, $877) [UNDP 2005:
Tables 14 and 15].
Heaton, Tim; Hirschl, Tom A. (1999)
"The trajectory of family change in
Using Demographic & Health Survey (DHS)
data on 9 000 Nigerian women that were collected in 1990 by the Federal
Office for Statistics and analysing differences among four age groups (<20;
20-29; 30-39; 40-49) they concluded from that "[a]mong all groups except
the Hausa, older women married at earlier ages." "Age differences
suggest an increasing tendency to use contraceptives among each group except
the Hausa and the trend is greatest
among the Ibo." And: "Indeed, the lack of age difference on factors
that are not altered across the life cycles of these women such as age at first
union and education support our interpretation that the Hausa have experienced
minimal social change in several aspects of their family lives. In
contrast despite the numerous and
substantial differences between Yoruba and Ibo families these differences appear to be
converging in response to structural and socioeconomic change."
Some interesting comparison tables, here
just for the 20-29 age groups:
|
|
Hausa |
Yoruba |
Ibo |
All others |
|
% Urban |
14.4% |
74.5% |
28.7% |
15.1% |
Mean education level (0=none; 3=post-secondary) |
0.12 |
1.49 |
1.19 |
0.76 |
|
% Not working |
50.2% |
28.8% |
40.9% |
48.9% |
|
Standard of
living index (composite of water supply, hygiene, electricity, flooring
material, etc.) |
2.35 |
4.01 |
2.90 |
2.33 |
|
Median age at
first marriage (years) |
14.4 |
21.1 |
20.9 |
17.9 |
|
% ever used
contraception |
2.2% |
20.2% |
10.8% |
12.1% |
|
Ideal number of
children: % responding "up to God" |
83.8% |
36.2% |
38.8% |
43.5% |
|
Age group 40-49
only |
|
|
|
|
|
Fertility: Children ever born if ever in union |
5.63 |
6.16 |
6.85 |
6.55 |
Source: Tim
Heaton and Tom A. Hirschl (1999). “The
trajectory of family change in
In 1993, UNDP Nigeria commissioned a
comparative study of life expectancy, adult literacy and income per capita
across the country’s then 19 states, and found considerable
variation. When these three
variables were aggregated into state-level “Human Development
Indices” (HDI), they ranged from a low of
SURVEY METHODOLOGIES
In the 1940s, the anthropologist Cora DuBois
developed the concept of the “modal personality”, which she defined
as central tendencies in the personalities of a group of peoples. Various psychological tests were
employed, including Rorschach test interpretations, children’s drawings,
responses to the Porteus Maze Test, word association and life biographies. George
Devereux subsequently has argued that this concept needs to be divided into
two, psychological, or subjective personality, and sociocultural, or collective
personality [Encyclopedia of anthropology / H. James Birx, editor., 2006].
Given that Nigerians comprise about one-fifth of the
African continent’s populace, they have been the subject of interest of a
number of international surveys since the 1970s. Since the work of the Dutch sociologist
Geert Hoftsede in the 1960s and 1970s, a number of academic, non-governmental
and for-profit organisations have undertaken cross-national attitudinal surveys
that have captured a wide variety of norms (cultural rules or standards
that guide one’s conduct in a particular society), mores (non-enforced
societal requirements for behaviour) helping us to develop an understanding of
national personality, social character, ethos, temperament and psychological
culture patterns. These
surveys effectively represent aggregated perspectives on a culture, the share
values of a people. In this report,
four surveys from academic sociologists, and one each from a not-for-profit
non-governmental organisation and commercial polling firm are examined in
detail for the sake of comparing Nigerian and Canadian responses:
|
Survey Title |
Date Survey Per-formed |
Total Coun-tries or Socie-ties |
Number of Persons Surveyed |
Total Survey Items (Scales) |
|
Survey Team |
Comments |
||
|
Total |
Cana-dians |
Nige-rians |
|||||||
|
World Values Survey
1990 (Principle Investigator: Ronald Inglehart, |
1990 |
43 |
56,056 |
780 |
1001 |
338 |
224 |
|
|
|
World Values Survey
2000 (Principle Investigator: Ronald
Inglehart, |
2000 |
81 |
118,519 |
1151 |
2022 |
302 |
123 |
|
|
|
James T. Gire &
D.W.Carment, Dept. of Psychology, |
1992 (?) |
2 ( |
230 |
110 students at |
120 students at |
12 |
12 |
James T. Gire & D.W.Carment, (1). |
Written survey,
university students at the |
|
GLOBE Study of 62
Societies (Global Leadership
and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness research program) (Robert J. House, |
1997 |
62 |
17,370 middle-level
managers |
? Range of 27 to 1,790 per country,
average size 251. 25.2% female
respondents (p.96) |
735 items, reduced to
nine dimensions, each scored by Practices and Values |
|
|||
|
Pew Global
Attitudes Project ( |
2002 ( |
44 |
38,263 |
500 |
1000 |
156 |
105 |
|
"Margin of Error: |
|
Social Axioms
Survey
http://personal.cityu.edu.hk/~mgkleung/sa.htm |
2002 (?) |
41 |
9,924 |
? Range of 52 ( |
60 items, reduced by
factor analysis to five dimensions (Social cynicism; Social complexity;
Reward for application; Religiosity; Fate control), then to two (Social
Cynicism; Dynamic Externality) |
|
"Gender-balanced". 7,672 university students
sample: Under 20 years: 56%; 21-30 years: 42%. 2,252 Adults sample: Age
distribution: Under 20: 5%; 21-30: 28%; 31-40: 20%; 41-50: 26%; 51-60: 15%;
60 and older: 6% |
||
|
Voice of the People
2006 / |
2005 (June) |
68 |
53,749 |
1,001, via telephone,
"national" |
500, face-to-face,
"main cities" |
Published survey contains
18 questions (1) |
18 |
|
Eight sub-Saharan
countries were included: |
Notes
(1) James T. Gire & D.W.Carment,
"Dealing with Disputes: The Influence of Individualism-Collectivism,"
Journal of Social Psychology 133(1):81-95.
(2)
Léger Marketing /
(3) Not all published Nigerian-Canadian data pairs in the individual surveys are included in this report.
Total Pew2002 Scales (individual questions):
Q2-Q87: 59 - 5 "summary" = 54
Q16-60: 102 (not including "Summary")
TOTAL Scales: 156
Q2-Q87: 67 occurrences of "
Q16-60: 103 occurrences of "
Therefore total Pew2002 Can-Nga data pairs = 106
Note: Pew has about additional Nigerian responses in the "21
Population Survey (2003)" which follows in the same PDF document as the
"44-Nation Major Survey (2002)" that begins with Q16 (T-1) and ends
at Q60 (p. T-103). The "21 Population Survey" begins on T-127
(mentioning Nigerian N=1000 May1-11 2003; Canada N=500 April 29-May 4 2003) ending on T-160 and there are 40
Can-Nga response pairs. Most relate to perceptions of post-911 geopolitics and not to general life perceptions. In
the 44-Nation survey Q49-Q55 were
asked only in Muslim populations of M.East
Asia Africa.
http://pewglobal.org/datasets/signup.php?DocID=168
|
Release Date |
Report Title |
Description |
|
12.04.02 |
What
the World Thinks in 2002 |
Summer
2002 44-Nation Survey (large file, 3.7MB) |
Country:
Company: Environics
Sample design: Probability
Mode: Telephone adults 18 plus
Languages: English and French
Fieldwork dates: July 16-24, 2002
Sample size: 500
Margin of Error: 4.4%
Representative: 100% of telephone households
Country:
Company: Research International
Sample design: Probability
Mode: Face-to-face adults 18 plus
Languages: Igbo, Hausa, Yoruba
Fieldwork dates: September 11-30, 2002
Sample size: 1000
Margin of Error: 3.1%
Representative: 100% adult population
Sample Representation of Raw Data (global
sample, 1990)
http://nds.umdl.umich.edu/w/wevs/wevs0015.htm#v177
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