IT is likely that language campaigners who are steadily focused on using the change in curriculum that is now being put into use will skip any discussion on steps taken by Nigeria to reverse its 2022 policy to mandate the use of indigenous languages in schools.

It has in a recent announcement reverted to English as the primary language of instruction from pre-primary to tertiary levels, which means it becomes an educational and business lingua franca, replacing competing languages like Hausa, Yoruba or Igbo. 

 The issue is whether the fact that we have a national quasi-mother tongue in Kiswahili, as it is mother tongue in detribalized urban families, makes a difference in what Nigeria has learned on the different sets of merits for either language.

 An entry in global social media said that the country’s federal minister for Education stated that the policy was ineffective, citing data that showed underperformance in areas that implemented it. The reversal aims to address this and ensure proficiency in English, which definitely is a plus in a highly competitive job market especially in the service industries,

 The measure was instituted in the context of formally scrapping the national language policy, which required the use of mother tongues in early years of schooling, a doctrinal position holding sway at the University of Dar es Salaam at least since 1978 when a landmark study in that direction was presented at a seminar, consolidating a movement for cultural indigenization rooted in ideology.

 The entry cites remarks from the minister that the policy failed to achieve its goals, as empirical data was clear on poor performance in regions where it was applied. This was also noticed by this writer in the past when out of lack of cash, the family of a close relative decided to remove three children in English medium schools to regular public schools, where the results were bad. 

 It was decided that the move be reversed to avoid a permanent decline in educational prospects of the children, so the family had to pull up its socks, along with well-wishers, to ensure that the children remained in English medium and assure a good launching pad for secondary schooling.

 There will be many lessons for education policy researchers that they refused to learn in the past, that it is now formal English will be reinstated as the main language of teaching and learning across all levels of education. There was no need for debate in that regard in the first place, but the traditional totem that no language is superior to the other, led to the abstract enunciation that one learns best by studying in the mother tongue, by creating mental ladders that start from the mother tongue to the foreign tongue. 

 As a matter of fact the only ladders are those of age, that when those entering preschool have some hours of playing, singing or dabbling in speaking sessions in English, they learn the language faster than when it is introduced in later stages.

 At times these features of language learning are available in experience, as a number of Anglophone ‘third cycle’ university students learned in France back in 1985, as some Nigerian students had come with their families. While their fathers (in particular) were battling with elementary French for the better part of three to six months to converse well, the children scarcely needed two months of playing with other children to cope. That is genetics, not policy. 

 There were auxiliary considerations raised by the Nigerian minister for reversing the policy of placing mother tongues at the centre of learning in the formative years, like shortages of teaching materials, textbooks and trained teachers for the numerous indigenous languages spoken in that country. 

 Here that would be irrelevant, as we have a national language policy rather than pushing for indigenous or mother tongues per se, as was the case there, but there are parameters in the learning or occupational outcomes as in Nigeria, that those who are schooled in English have a better start in occupations, not to speak of careers when they grow up, so English is liberating.

 Even as Nigerian analysts have a fallback argument of an extraordinary diversity there making it difficult to choose one or even a few languages for instruction, especially in urban areas where classrooms are linguistically mixed, that argument applies in a different way for Tanzania. 

 The diversity comes up with how far the transition to English is effective in secondary school when a vital component of learning, preschool and six or seven years later, is devoted to learning in the national language, hampering a youth seeking to latch upon some occupation after schooling - and then realizes there are customers he or she can’t reach, so the youthful adult has to scale down ambitions for an occupation whose language demands are less forbidding. 

Thus the whole effort to compel pupils to use Kiswahili arose from developmental lethargy of aid, thus issues of economic efficiency and the market were left out, now taken up as empowerment, causing crisis.