Lately, the Minister of State for Education, Prof. Anthony Anwukah, announced that French was on its way to becoming Nigeria’s second official language. As a result, learning French will be a compulsory subject in Nigerian schools up till tertiary level. Anwukah did not elaborate on whether this is an oncoming policy or a mere declaration of intent. Springing the notice on us during the visit of the French Ambassador seems more like a spontaneous idea than one that was spurred by an overall government ideology. Already, French as a subject of study exists in the Nigerian curriculum. What is perhaps new here is the decision to raise it to the tertiary level, a development that may turn out to be rather impractical when confronted by reality.
How will French as a second Nigerian language work when public schools – elementary to tertiary – face the more urgent problem of basic infrastructure – lack of habitable classrooms and amenities students need to study effectively? Nigerian public schools are such a crying shame that even those tasked with superintending them send their own children to private schools. If Nigeria does not have enough resources to guarantee effective learning of what currently subsists, why impose more and then beg the French Ambassador to come to your aid? We grew up learning French in schools and if it no longer exists, we should first ask what went wrong.
Equally important is to question where, in the long term, this idea gets us as a nation.
Anwukah was quoted as saying learning French was “a matter of necessity.” For better relations with our Francophone neighbours, he thinks learning French will come in handy. Sweet Pan-Africanist sentiment but why is talking with non-Nigerians more urgent than Nigerians communicating among ourselves and in their own indigenous languages too? There are existing policies about learning local languages in school curriculum that died along with French language. If we are truly concerned about our communication, why not resurrect both to enhance relationships locally and internationally?
Meanwhile, for decades, Nigerians who have traded along West African routes like Togo, Ivory Coast, and Benin Republic have spoken French. I grew up around a few of them, some of whom could not successfully string sentences in English but yet spoke French fluently. One major point I think is missing from Anwukah’s “policy” is a consideration of people’s motivation. Most Nigerians have not learnt French because they have had no strong reason to do so. Those who did in secondary school did not find much use for it and the little we knew petered out. Unlike an average Western European who speaks three or four languages of surrounding countries because their countries are linked by infrastructure, trade, culture and values, Africans have no similar binding ties. In fact, Africans tend to relate more with non-Africans than themselves.
Imposing a foreign language on a whole nation should not be for its sake, rather, it should be conjoined with other developmental ideas. For instance, we should be speaking of taking advantage of our countries’ spatial contiguity to develop infrastructure – like railway, for instance – that stretches through West African corridor merging our land and human resources for purposes of agriculture, manufacturing, trade and opening up markets. That will facilitate language learning quicker than the abstraction of classroom learning.
This is not the first time we would be travelling this route. Some years ago, we were told by the Babatunde Fashola administration that the study of Mandarin would be made compulsory in schools in Lagos State because the Chinese were going to be the world’s superpower. To prepare our children to take advantages of the opportunities such a realigned world would spawn, they should learn Mandarin. This line of reasoning is not particularly new. When it was assumed that due to its rising economic power and military might, Japan was set to be the world’s next superpower, some people rushed to learn Japanese too. Today, Japan has done great things but is not ready to displace the US’ world standing. The same argument about learning a language ahead of future reality is being made about Mandarin.
That is one reason I think we should be careful about imposing languages and foreign cultures on our children in the guise of preparing them for the future. We should not make a habit of either shape shifting or panel beating in order to position ourselves to pick crumbs that would expectedly fall off the global table. Rather, we should be thinking of how we can get a chair at the table too. We should be planning to claim our place in the world and taking specific steps to arrive there. Arbitrarily pulling out policies for no defined or clearly articulated reason will not get us there. There should be a stronger reason to force French as a second language and such a reason should be built into our long-term ideas, visions and projections as a nation.
Centuries ago, our ancestors thought if their children learnt the coloniser’s language, adopted the religion and recreated themselves in the white man’s image, they would tap into opportunities the cataclysmic changes going on in the world at that time would bring. They were right but only partially. We have travelled far but our continent is still at the lowest rung of the world’s ladder. We should know by now that it takes more than learning a language to develop a nation. Slapping French on kids who barely make a credit pass in English or even their native language may backfire just when it turns out the education only induces enough curiosity in them to want to consume other people’s cultures, not understudy them to produce for them. What would be our gain if we merely become another market for French culture?
The United States and its position as the world’s superpower is an example of how you make cultural policies work for you. It did not just happen that the US occupies such an enviable position in the world today. From post-World Wars, their government worked on invading cultures around the world with American culture. It was a well-funded project and today they reap the result. We consume their movies, their music, their politics and popular culture while they get paid for it. If Nigeria wants to introduce a foreign language as a second language, we should be more forward looking than merely communicating with a Togolese.
I must at this point emphasise that I have no problem with schoolchildren learning more languages, what I object to is arbitrariness and lack of planning. Language is a very valuable resource and those who understand only one go through life with a handicap. Multilingualism, studies have found, has both biological and cultural advantages. While we try to increase our quota in the world, we owe it to ourselves to take an inward look into our condition as well. Language is about privilege and access but simply knowing how to parrot words is not enough to make us portable through the world. The politics of who gets to go where; and who accesses certain places of power and opportunities are far more complicated than merely speaking a second international language. It has more to do with what your contribution to the world is, not what you have prepped yourself to take from it. Countries like the US have made it far while being largely monolingual because they built a formidable country first. They can afford the arrogance of not speaking anyone else’s language. If the Chinese today are occupying the corners of the world, it is not because they learnt English, French or any other language. And no, they did not have to raise their children on a Western cultural diet, creating vicarious western citizens out of an Asian population. Anwukah and his fellow travellers will do well to understand that.
PUNCH
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