In Support of Scrapping Mother Tongue Teaching Policy

Obinna Chima, Editor, THISDAY Saturday

OBINNA CHIMA

Nigeria’s learning crisis can no longer be ignored. Despite the fact that successive governments over the years continue to double down on policies that barely scratch the surface, the country is confronted with a serious emergency in its education sector.

One of such challenges hurting the education sector is the mother tongue instruction policy, which, for me, the current debate over its ban misses a crucial truth. If we are serious about tackling learning poverty, we must confront our biases and embrace evidence, not sentiment, in shaping the future of education.

Mother tongue education refers to any form of schooling that uses the language or languages that children are most familiar with to help them learn. This is usually the language that children speak at home with their family. It was designed to help children learn effectively and aims at ensuring children acquire real learning and foundational skills, equipping them with a competitive advantage for future success.

Nigeria’s National Policy on Education (NPE) 1977, 1981, 1998, 2004, 2007 and 2013 articulates that the mother tongue or language of the immediate community should be the language of instruction in pre-primary and lower primary education. This policy framework is theoretically sound, rooted in constructivist principles, and aligned with international best practices.

No doubt there are evidence-based studies that show that when kids learn in their mother tongue in early childhood, they comprehend better. However, gaps in the policy implementation remain substantial. The country’s ethnic and linguistic diversity, with not less than 520 indigenous languages, makes the mother tongue policy attractive in theory, but daunting in practice. Implementing it impartially would require massive investments in textbooks, teacher training, curriculum development, and assessment tools for dozens of languages within a single state.

Limited development of orthographies and learning materials in many Nigerian languages, as well as inadequate teacher training and deployment in multilingual pedagogies, are also major setbacks to this policy.

In a system already struggling with a myriad of challenges, attempting this scale of localisation risks deepening inequality rather than improving learning outcomes.

At this point however, it is important to stress that cancelling the mother language policy does not in any way mean abolishing subjects such as Yoruba, Hausa, Igbo, and other native languages already being taught in both primary and secondary schools in the country. This only means abolishing the use of mother tongue in teaching pupils.

The Minister of Education, Dr. Tunji Alausa, recently highlighted why Nigeria needs to overhaul the learning processes in the education sector, describing the situation as an emergency that requires urgent attention, a reality that aligns with my own concerns.

In a position paper, the Minister argued that despite high enrolment, 45 million children aged seven and 14 cannot read a simple sentence, while learning outcomes remain unacceptably low.

Quoting UNICEF data, he stressed that the crisis remains uneven, with the North-west bearing the largest burden with literacy and numeracy rates of 9.4 per cent and 8.3 per cent respectively, followed by the North-east with 12 per cent and 10.7 per centCOMMA respectively.

Besides, he noted that North-central has literacy and numeracy rates of 24.3 per cent and 22.7 per cent, respectively, while the South-west has 45.8 per cent and 46.7 per cent rates. The South-east has the highest literacy and numeracy rates at 55.8 per cent and 52 per cent, while the South-south has 37 per cent and 34 per cent, respectively.

“Nigeria is in a learning emergency. Despite high enrolment, 45 million children aged 7–14 still cannot read a simple sentence, and learning outcomes remain unacceptably low. The crisis is uneven across the country,” he argued.

Data also show that Nigeria’s children are facing a severe and uneven learning crisis, with some regions lagging far behind in both literacy and numeracy. The gap between schooling and actual learning reflects a system-wide decline in education quality.

This necessitated the comprehensive reform package that the Federal Ministry of Education recently unveiled, which includes the recent cancellation of the National Language Policy, aimed at improving the quality of education and learning outcomes.

Some of these also include reviewing pre-service teacher training, nationwide capacity building for teachers, school leaders, and monitoring and evaluation officers, digital training with incentives, and the establishment of teacher Communities of Practice (CoP).

Nevertheless, the language policy review, one component of the broader effort, has emerged as the single most contentious, drawing the loudest debate and reaction. This controversy becomes even clearer when you consider the realities inside the classroom.

For example, a teacher posted or employed to either private or public schools in the Northern part of Nigeria who cannot speak the local language will not be able to implement the policy of using the mother tongue. Likewise, someone from the North, East, or South posted to any of the regions will not be able to teach the learners in that regard.

Another example is the learners themselves, who come from different backgrounds and find themselves in the same class. With this, it is always difficult to use the mother tongue of that area to teach them. If mother tongue is used, then there would be no inclusivity, thereby depriving other students from learning. Unfortunately, in some states, they are taught in their mother language up to secondary level, and by the time the students are set to take national examinations such as WAEC, NECO, JAMB, they are not able to compete with their peers from other parts of the country that have been exposed to learning with English from childhood.

Additionally, another irony is that in some of these states, while the public schools teach their pupils with their mother tongue, in the private schools, where most of the elites send their children to, the case is different, as the language of instruction is often English, thereby creating a dichotomy in the society.

Countries like China, which has implemented this policy, with Mandarin as the language of learning, and India, which has Hindi as its national language, despite having other languages, have built educational materials and invested heavily in these two languages to boost learning outcomes, which have long-term multiplier effects on their productivity, respectively.

Nigeria lacks the heavy investment required to develop educational materials around its diverse languages. The country also has a complex ethnic structure and the mother tongue policy has been seen to be significantly damaging to students in certain parts of the country, especially northern Nigeria.

That is why the cancellation of the mother tongue policy should be supported, and English being a common language adopted.

In the present world, where Artificial Intelligence presents dazzling opportunities and promises every child the kind of upbringing once available only to the rich, the Nigerian child must not be left behind or confined by policies that limit global competitiveness.

Nigeria’s policymakers should be focused on an education system where no child is disadvantaged by language, supported by political will, partnerships, funding, and regional collaboration.

By adopting English early, supported by strong literacy interventions and culturally inclusive teaching, Nigeria positions its children not only to learn better today but to thrive in the global knowledge economy.