Description
Ifá, the oral literary of the Yoruba people's epistemic system, relegated by the colonial legacy rooted in Western liberal norms and epistemes, can be brought to the fore and mainstreamed in the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) through its financial inclusion toolkit. Nigerian people have been oblivious to what they already knew. How, and why this happened - through 1980s and 1990s neoliberalism and global financial institutions development agenda - is a theme of this paper. In fact, within the complex, uniquely Yoruba epistemic system, community-based financial institutions already exist lending themselves to the principle of 'start from where we already are’. Acknowledgement and healing of the collective social trauma, resulting from the successive failed neoliberal market-orientated development paradigms, may be essential to this process. Nevertheless, any reform of a market system, even with Amartya Sen’s style of Western development that is critical of the market, will still propagate the Western contractarian philosophical conception of the self, as opposed to the Yoruba indigenous episteme intrinsic understanding of the self as existing only when obligated to society.
