Obiajulu Emejulu, PhD
National Institute for Nigerian Languages (NINLAN ), Aba
Chairman, Board of Trustees, Literacy Promotion Association, Nigeria (LiPAN)
It is hardly believable that Nigeria is celebrating her 64th independence anniversary this October 2024 with no certainty that it is about to decolonise her education industry, linguistically speaking! It is indeed a big irony of situation that the country that gave the world Professor Aliu Babatunde Fafunwa and his world-acclaimed longitudinal study, the Ife Six-Year Primary Project, in the 1970s is, in 2024, still dragging her feet about implementing the new National Language Policy (NLP, 2023) and the National Reading Framework (NRF, 2023) that would revolutionize education and learning for her citizens. Before I appear to be attempting to be alarmist or sensational, I will quickly throw more light on my thoughts and concerns.
In my keynote paper at the 2022 Mid-term conference of the Literacy Promotion Association, Nigeria (LiPAN), formerly the Reading Association of Nigeria (RAN), I adduced evidence to show that pre-independent Nigeria was on course to becoming a truly multilingual giant, in which the blossoming Western, formal education conducted predominantly in English but with indigenous language support in early primary schooling, was greatly complimented by the informal traditional education that was in indigenous languages, producing a cream of Nigerian educated elite who were competent bilinguals (Emejulu, 2023). However, this evolving bilingual education was not consolidated at independence and has been aborted repeatedly since then. When a country gains independence from a colonial power, it sets out to change the way some important affairs such as administration, political philosophy, education and international relations, etc., are handled to suit its national interests, as against those of the departing colonial power. While Nigeria successfully Nigerianized the personnel and policy involved in many of the crucial sectors of her national life, it has not been able to indigenize the content or the language of transmission of most of them. So, we have the NLP and the NRF today, crying out for radical implementation, just like the National Policy on Education (NPE).
We have the evidence of various European and Asian countries that most countries thrive and industrialize on the wings of their indigenous languages, not on imposed colonial languages. We also have the spectacular evidence of Bolivia in Central America, of a country that radically transformed herself and her education by abandoning a Spanish language mono-linguistic tradition for a pluralistic, multilingual ethos that accommodated all the 35 indigenous languages of the country, with full logistical and financial support from the central government.This transition resulted in the country eradicating illiteracy through a revamped indigenous languages-mediated education, and being declared illiteracy-free by UNESCO within fifteen years.
Thanks to multilateral and foreign development partners like Unicef, UNESCO, USAID, DFID, to mention a few, Nigeria has been getting necessary support to transform her education by implementing indigenous languages-driven early grade literacy regime. The British Council round tables on the language of instruction in Nigeria held between 2018 and 2020 provide clear evidence that even the colonial power that bequeathed the English language to Nigeria is sold on multilingual education as the ideal model of education for young Nigerian children. It is therefore up to the Federal and State Governments in Nigeria, as well as Nigerian educationalists and citizens, to insist on a definitive move to implement the NLP and NRF in order to achieve a radical transformation of our literacy and educational landscape.
In a highly globalized society in which digital technology has become second nature to Nigerians of all social and economic status, the need for early grade literacy in indigenous languages has become even more urgent because the informal, Nigerian languages-based traditional education has been considerably weakened and does not provide that powerful foregrounding it did in the past. Young children are now enlisted in pre-schooling programmes more and more, and at more tender ages, while parents and significant other adults are far more encumbered – and less endowed linguistically – today for sufficient indigenous language foundation to be laid for the children, or be sustained afterwards.
The time has finally come for the National Institute for Nigerian Languages (NINLAN) to emerge from the shadows to play the role for which it was set up by Federal Government in 1992, under the intellectual guidance of Prof. A. B. Fafunwa as Minister of Education. In this emergent clime, Nigerian experts and their organisations, such as the Quality Education Development Associates (QEDA) and the Literacy Promotion Association, Nigeria should make their presence count.
