By Ganiu Bamgbose, PhD
The decision of the 69th National Council on Education (NCE) to cancel the National Language Policy has met with great condemnation from stakeholders across walks of life. I should put it straightforwardly that the cancellation should be condemned indeed. This is because language is not just a means of communication; it is a carrier of worldview which is also used to shape identity and construct ideologies. To stop the use of indigenous languages as a means of instruction in schools is to take a huge step towards bringing the languages into extinction. It is therefore important to collectively condemn and protest against such acts as bodies such as the Linguistic Association of Nigeria (LAN) and Nigeria Academy of Letters (NAL) have done. What I find funny and worth sharing however is how it is always easy to foreground the government part of issues in Nigeria; often sweeping under the carpet the “silent” roles played by other stakeholders and citizens in supporting many such obnoxious governmental decisions. I will detail few of such roles in the subsequent paragraphs.
First, anyone may call this trivial but I will ask this question: how many of the people in the forefront of this call for reversal of the mother tongue policy do their children call daddies and mummies in their indigenous languages? When I declared openly at my son’s naming ceremony that the boy shall grow to call me “baba” and not daddy and that everyone should please call me “Baba Damilola”, and not “Daddy Dami”, it became a joke in my home and work communities for a long time with some rather doing it comically and others asking questions such as “are you not a lecturer of English?”. The minister visits many professors and perhaps hear their children speak English as the language of the home so it is in place for him to think even the people have preference for English. Let us all too answer with sincerity: How many of us use our mother tongue as the official language of our homes? How many of our children speak our indigenous languages as fluently as they speak English? You may want to give yourself the sincere answer. Do we not call them Clinton instead of Chukwudi? And Qudus instead of Oluwatobilola? This is not an attack on religion but have we not also thought we would not be Christians and Muslims well enough if our children are not called the Biblical and Quranic names? How many Nigerians have their native names as their first names? Are these names that describe our origins, values and virtues not always thrown somewhere in the middle of the arrangement?
Moving on, I do not claim to have been to many parts of the country but from the places I have visited, I can say confidently that this policy being cancelled was not ever actually in use. Were schools actually teaching in the language of the immediate environment in the early primary classes before now? How many of us would leave our children in schools where indigenous languages serve as the language of instruction from primary 1 to 3? How many of the teachers in those primary classes even speak their native languages fluently? In which schools are poems in Nigerian languages recited on the assembly ground? Perhaps we want to reflect on these questions too.
Finally, what level of investment has gone into developing Nigerian languages to cater for pedagogical needs? I know of the individual efforts of scholars and associations to help these languages grow but to what extent have we pressurised and got the government to invest in the development of these languages through the creation of metalanguage and other ways? In how many Nigerian languages can Physics, Chemistry and Literature be taught? If we had been committed to the use of mother tongue in early years of primary school since the time it became a national policy, should we not have talked about extending the policy to other classes in primary education with English as a subject? These questions too are ours to answer.
I close this piece by saying that the cancellation of the National Language Policy was the last in the several steps that led to the decision. And when we are done with the government, we should sincerely also appraise ourselves as people and systems and interrogate our roles in what we vehemently commend.
© 2025 Ganiu Bamgbose writes from the Department of English, Lagos State University.
