•Oba Akiolu of Lagos State
The government held a one-day workshop for all traditional rulers in Lagos on Monday at the Lagos Airport Hotel, Ikeja, Lagos, southwest Nigeria, to brainstorm on how to manage communal clashes in the state.
Speaking at the workshop, Commissioner for Local Government and Communities Affairs, Muslim Folami, said the state government wanted the monarchs to play active part in preventing communal clashes in their domains as custodians of traditional institutions.
He said the theme of the workshop: ‘Roles of Traditional Rulers as Community Developers and Managing Communal and Intra-Communal Conflicts,’ was apt as the traditional rulers know how to manage such conflicts in their localities.
Folami stated that the state government was concerned about the improvement, uplifting, sustaining and protection of the traditional values and institutions in Lagos State.
According to him, at the end of the workshop, the traditional rulers were expected to be reawakened to their roles in maintaining peace, stability and harmonious co-existence in their different domains.
In his paper, titled ‘Traditional Rulers as Community Developers: The Expectations’, Olutoyin Falade, a consultant from Douglas and Payne Consulting Limited, said the traditional rulers were responsible for determining feasible community development programmes based on the needs, priorities and available resources as well as provide information to rural people on where and how to obtain farm input and also enforce government’s laws such as tax and rate payments through dialogue and persuasion.
“It is your responsibility to awake the political consciousness in the community and develop proposals for funding by the community, governmental or non-governmental bodies. You are also to settle household and community-based disputes and also arrest hoodlums in the community,” she said.
In her second paper, titled ‘Conflict Resolution-Leading a Community with a Win-Win Result,’ Falade recommended that the traditional institutions could adopt the Alternative Dispute Resolution, ADR, mechanism due to frustration, delay of justice, prohibitive cost and unsatisfactory determination of cases in the court system.
She advocated a ‘win-win’ solution to dispute management among warring parties in the communities, saying that the win-win solution is when each side of a dispute felt they had won and that since both sides benefitted from such a scenario, any resolutions to the conflict were likely to be accepted voluntarily.
On conflict resolution, Falade urged the monarchs as mediators, to first of all identify the source of the conflict, look beyond the incident, request solutions from the warring parties, identify solutions both disputants could support and then allow the parties to reach agreement
