When Tradition Meets Progress, Someone Must Choose the Future

Nigeria often frames development as a technical problem. We talk about power shortages and infrastructure gaps. But beneath the spreadsheets and feasibility studies lies a quieter obstacle that rarely makes it into policy documents: culture. Not culture as heritage or identity, but culture as habit and inherited restraint. The kind that stops projects before they start, not because they are impossible, but because they are inconvenient to tradition.

That is why Aliko Dangote’s recent revelation about the construction of the 650,000 barrels per day Dangote refinery in Ibeju-Lekki deserves more attention than it has received.

Hear him:

“I must recognise and thank the Ooni of Ife for enabling the building of our factory. What happened was that when we got there, there were over 19 shrines at the site. Nobody was able to go near there to do anything. But Ooni went there, stood there and said ‘remove all of them. Let the gods come and talk to me’.”

It was a moment that captured Nigeria in miniature. The tension between reverence and reason.

Customs, traditions, and even laws are human inventions. They exist to serve human flourishing. When they begin to obstruct collective progress, they must be interrogated, not worshipped. This is a principle many societies accept in theory but struggle to practice.

In Nigeria, I have seen sacred spaces trumping public interest. Roads have been rerouted and industrial sites abandoned for no other reason other than ‘ancestral lands’. Entire communities remain underdeveloped because something must not be touched or moved. The result is a nation where tradition is preserved but prosperity is postponed.

Progress always requires renegotiation of norms. In nineteenth-century Japan, the Meiji Restoration dismantled feudal structures and sacred prohibitions to industrialize rapidly. In India, temple lands were repurposed for universities and research institutes after independence. In Europe, church authority gradually yielded space to civic governance, enabling modern institutions to emerge.

Nigeria is not unique in its struggle. What is unique is how often the struggle ends in retreat.

The intervention of the Ooni in this case suggests a different possibility. One where tradition does not disappear but evolves. One where custodians of culture recognize when reverence becomes a barrier rather than a guide.