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Our ‘valueless’ mother tongueBy: Ojimbah Lee Bon Publ. Date: January 19, 2010 The issue of eradication of illiteracy and its benefits has been bothering my mind for years now, thinking of method we can apply. Before going on, I have some questions to ask. (1)How many languages does Nigeria speak? (2)Which one matters most, our mother tongue or English? Why I ask these questions goes back to when I was in school. English was and still important. If we passed the English language, but failed to pass our mother tongue, we still stood a great chance of going ahead with our studies. Is there any way we can reverse this trend? We are fast losing our mother tongue and our identity to the English language. To me the English language is a method of the colonial masters to grab and confuse our minds and make us lose our culture and tongue. If this is not so, why are we using English as our first language? Why using English both for information and as a medium of instruction in our schools? Textbooks are written in the language, and we also claim that we are an English speaking country. What relevance do Igbo, Hausa, Yoruba and other languages have in Nigeria today?
Every time I hear on television about the eradication of poverty, I find it difficult to understand how we can achieve it. Every country in Europe uses its own language and educates its citizens using the language. How then can we crush poverty when more than 70% of the population cannot understand this foreign language English?
Using a foreign language, it shows that we are losing something very important and profitable to us. If our textbooks are written in our languages, our children will be much better educated than they are today. And through this we can create employment for our people too.
In Switzerland, four languages are spoken and textbooks are written in each of the languages. Pakistan and India colonized by the English turned to their languages when the colonial masters left, and the English language became a matter of choice. The case of the European Union countries is another. The countries within the union are not going to lose their languages. Will Hungary and some other small members in the union be asked to speak English, French or German because some languages had been in use before they joined?
It is only in Africa people are not proud of speaking their own languages, which is why we are going off the track in the effective means of educating our people, promoting our culture. It is worrisome that we cannot use our rich languages and culture to create jobs for millions of our jobless graduates across the continent. Wait a minute! Let’s come back to our senses. For those of us who live here in Hungary, do you know how much money this country is making from translating other languages into Hungarian or from Hungarian into other languages? And how many jobs has this process created for Hungarians and foreigners working in the Language Translation Office? And then think of how many jobs we will create for our people and how much revenue we will generate for our countries if we have similar sense of job creation. I am not here saying that speaking the English language is bad, but it should not be a do or die affair for our people in order to acquire positions or to make headway in their chosen careers. Again, here in Hungary how many Hungarians are here who cannot speak, read and write Hungarian? There are, but just a few. Even the homeless here read newspapers because they are written in their language, and not in Dutch or in any other foreign language which they do not understand. Well, all I am saying is that we should make changes where changes are necessary if the idea of eradication of illiteracy is not yet another conduit pipe for the corrupt elements in our midst to stark more money away.
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