Culture Activist Condemns Ban On Indigenous Languages In Schools
Igbo culture activist and founder of Maka Odinma Ndigbo, Nze Kanayo Chukwumezie, on Monday, described the ban on the use of indigenous languages to teach in Nigerian schools as unfortunate.
Nze Chukwumezie said the action of the federal government was embarrassing. He likened the directive “to a parent preferring to kill his own child when she/he has the remedies to make the child recover fully”.
Quoting him, “Many other African countries are completely stopping the use of foreign/colonial languages as the medium of teaching in their schools, and the so-called giant of Africa is killing its own indigenous languages as if working as a mercenary to foreign powers.”
Chukwumezie said he had written several times that most European countries developed their languages in the 1980s and 1990s.
He stated, “I went to study in Belgium in 1990. In the universities, then, most textbooks were in English. The professors were only making Dutch-language handouts from these English textbooks. Today, that is no longer the case because the government provided an enabling environment for innovation, research and technology transfer.”
On the peculiarities of Nigeria’s multi-ethnic nationalities, Chukwumezie said, “Belgium is a multilingual country like Nigeria. It actually operates different parliaments for the different languages, yet it has a federal government. And this is strictly because of languages; and they are developing well, living in unity in the capital of the European Union.”
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In the face of the agitations for self-determination, which the government said informed the ban, Chukwumezie advised the government to adopt true federalism and a transparent electoral system to rebuild Nigeria’s confidence in the government. He urged state governors to retain their respective indigenous tongues in teaching their pupils and students.
He said, “This policy should therefore be reversed and turned the other way round. If we have governors who love their people, then this policy will die a natural death in states.”
