We should cling to our traditional social support system for the elderly

For someone who has grown up in the African setup, and some other places, where ageing citizens find their support in close family members, it might feel scary to imagine that the elderly are sent to special homes to be taken care of by professional strangers, elsewhere.

However, the realities of social transformation, escalating demands around work arrangements coupled with rising life expectancies and other relevant changes imply that African society is edging its way towards the same approach to handling its elderly. Younger generations are likely not to find enough time to have their ageing parents and grandparents under their direct care, and to live with them in the same homes.

Also, the inherent decline in adherence to traditional norms, customs and rules of conduct may contribute to the matter. Today’s working class, therefore, is likely to discover that if they live long enough, their children may want to delegate their old age care to a paid hand, and with time, in a place where they are with fellow elderly to interact with, just as it happens in societies where such things long took root.

If the above happens, it will be unfortunate for a number of reasons. The African social system, from which a lot of our pillars emerge as a society, was constructed around ensuring the transmission of knowledge and customs across generations. As such, African child was as much raised by their grandparents as by their parents.

This was largely assured by the fact that the child’s parents and grandparents lived in the same place or within a short distance of one another in many cases. The ageing grandparents would be assured of care from their own children, who would then be young, energetic adults.

At the same time, the grandparents would have enough time to nurture their grandchildren, since naturally they would have slowed down concerning work and be spending most of their time at home.

Apart from the fact that young adults would therefore have enough, uninterrupted, time to dedicate to their work duties in the comfort of the knowledge that their children were in good care at home, the very young children benefited from the wealth of knowledge and experiences of their grandparents and were groomed into responsible citizens. The arrangement above contributed significantly to the preservation of African social norms, customs and practices. It safeguarded society’s soul.

If we completely lose this kind of social system, a journey which we have well embarked on already, as a matter of fact, the behaviour of our populations, our approach to relationships, preservation of family and the ability to make a good judgment between what is right or wrong will go down the drain. Our society would prone to all kinds of influence, some of which may be negative. Its youths would grope in the dark, with the possibility of insufficient appraisal of their self-worth, and could easily form their aspirations way outside the realities of their actual situations.

Social norms affect every aspect of a person’s life and can determine a society’s economic progress either positively or negatively. If a society loses control of the process of influencing the social norms adopted by its young ones, it faces a more rigorous task of trying to influence adults into what may be generally beneficial, but yet unappealing to the said adults. A haphazardly evolving social system is not favourable at all, and yet it is a likely scenario in a situation where the foundations of our social construction continue to crack.

Young adults may genuinely lack the needed time to sufficiently influence and groom their children. The economic demands of our times dictate so. For those young adults whose parents are still alive, therefore, this duty would rather be passed on by having young children spend enough time with their grandparents. We can preserve our social fabric that way. In so doing, we will implicitly keep the child-parent-grandparent bond stronger.

This would offer necessary social support to the elderly. It would also provide needed control around the formation of our population’s social wiring. It is a winning arrangement for everyone. Otherwise, we will have a society in which people do not know how to behave and function to provide order and predictability. Such can easily degrade to a society which is not in charge of itself.

When we see older generations continually dumbfounded by the conduct of younger people, it is possibly because no one is in charge of guiding young generations properly, to an extent. The traditional social support system for Africa’s elderly, which ensured constant interaction between children and grandparents, was actually always a critical benefit to younger generations, and to society as a whole.

Raymond is a Chartered Risk Analyst and risk management consultant

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