High bride price gets traditional council’s attention

The high cost of bride price as well as cost of burials has gotten the attention of the Tiv Traditional Council (TATC) which has set up a 15-man committee to look into it.

The Chairman of the Council, His Royal Majesty, Prof. James Ayatse said that committee will have to figure out the best way to bring down the items for bride price and the cost of burial ceremonies.

The committee, which has three months to submit its report, is headed by His Royal Highness, Chief Jam Gbinde Ter Ikyor, and had been directed to investigate the reasons for the high bride price and recommend ways of addressing the challenge.

The TATC chairman lamented that the high bride price was hindering bachelors and spinsters from getting married, noting that  in some cases, young men resorted to acquiring resources through unacceptable means to meet up with the challenge.

Ayatse also directed the committee to evolve ways of reducing cost incurred during burials, lamenting that burials had now been turned to ceremonies, adding that such practice was totally alien to Tiv culture.

According to him, there is need to address the problem as borrowed trends of expensive marriages and burials have inflicted poverty on families.

The chairman called on relevant religious bodies and stakeholders to help in eradicating such borrowed cultures, values and traditions that were not beneficial to the growth and development of Tiv land.

The chairman also directed the committee to suggest a decent dress code to restore the dignity of the people, noting that ordinary people now put on beads as if they were traditional rulers or title holders.

He also called on the committee to suggest measures that would check the indiscriminate sales of ancestral land by some family members who never considered the plight of future generations.

Ayatse noted that such acts were responsible for incessant communal clashes in the area of recent.