Scrapping mother tongue policy won’t kill local languages —Education minister, Alausa

File photo: The Minister of Education, Tunji Alausa.

Kindly share this story:

Minister of Education, Tunji Alausa, discusses with IMOLEAYO OYEDEYI the key national issues affecting the education sector, with a focus on the reform policies rolled out by the present administration

On October 23, you clocked one year as the 31st substantive Minister of Education. How will you describe the journey so far?

It’s been very fruitful and impactful. You know we have a President, Bola Tinubu, who believes so much in education. When he was going to make his cabinet reshuffle, it was clear to all that he knew the capabilities of all his ministers, and he would not give them any work that he believed they could not do. I think that months after that, the President was vindicated in the transformation we brought to the Nigerian education system with six clear high-priority areas that we have tackled in a concurrent manner, and we are beginning to see significant results.

The number one was to bring technical education and vocational training back to our schools, and we have been successful in this. First, we have revived the interest of Nigerian youths in technical and vocational education. We have let them know that this is the bedrock of society. We have been able to reawaken their conscience and interest in this key area.

We have launched a practical-based training initiative. We had about 250,000 students in the first cohort with the aim of enrolling one million within the next two to three years. The training is going so well. We are paying the participants monthly stipends. In the skill-training centre, we pay N45,000 per month for each student, and we are giving the students N22,500 as their monthly stipends. We are also paying the schools training them.

The second part of that agenda is to blend public funding with the private sector such that we will have lots of funds, and the private schools will also get a lot of money to put into rebuilding their workshops, buying state-of-the-art equipment and employing qualified teachers. Our overall aim is to get the students gainfully employed after school, basically through entrepreneurship.

What were the critical educational challenges you met, and what steps have you taken to address them?

We met significant infrastructural decay. Before we took over, there was the problem of strikes in our tertiary institutions. Our students were not having interest in technical and vocational education. There were also poor-quality teachers and examination fraud in both WAEC and NECO. But I can boldly say now that every one of these challenges has been effectively tackled. We have addressed the issue of examination fraud. WAEC will be Computer-Based Test from 2026. They piloted the CBT system in the last May/June exam. NECO will also be CBT. So, we have almost eliminated examination fraud.

Secondly, we have been successful in bringing back vocational and technical education.

In terms of infrastructural decay in our primary schools, we have rehabilitated almost 20,000 primary and junior secondary schools. We are also equipping them with modern facilities like solar electricity. We are also deploying technology in each school. In the area of teacher training, we are deploying digital content for our teachers to use. Strikes in the tertiary institutions have been eliminated, as there was none in the last academic session. All these are not coincidental.

But the biggest part is something we haven’t talked much about in public. President Tinubu promised Nigerians that university strikes were going to be a thing of the past. That has happened, and to seal it, we have negotiated the best salary increment for our university lecturers, the best to have happened in the history of this country. We have made that commitment. So, literally, all the challenges that we met, we have tackled head-on and we are moving strongly.

Obviously, we are going to build many more schools as we aim to increase the quality of literacy and numeracy of our students. Already, we have made our curriculum competence-based, focusing it on what matters, i.e., what the industry truly needs. We have also increased the number of students that can be admitted into our tertiary institutions. We have expanded that by 500,000. Before, our institutions were taking around 700,000 students, but we have increased that capacity to 1.2 million.

Before, we used to have compulsory credits in English and Mathematics. But we have changed that to credits in what matters. For instance, if your child is going for engineering or sciences, he or she needs to have credits in Mathematics and other subjects that matter. He doesn’t need credit in English. We have also doubled the number of students for admission into medical, dental and nursing schools. In a bid to improve the quality of our medical schools in the six geo-political zones, we have spent over N120bn in the last one year. We have built modern laboratories and additional hostels for them. So, we have made significant achievements in these areas.

A vital aspect of the educational burden is the brain drain syndrome. How have you been addressing this?

No doubt, we have tackled the brain-drain syndrome and I will tell you why. When I first came into the Ministry of Health, everybody was doing Japa Japa. But if you look closely in the last few months, there hasn’t been much talk of Japa. And what we have done is simple: we observed that we have a large population. So, we said, let’s open up the space and train more people. For instance, if you train 5,000 doctors and 50 per cent of them later leave, you will be left with nothing much. But if you graduate like 20,000 doctors a year, and some leave, you will still be having up to 15,000 on the ground. And that’s what we have done with nursing.

Before this government came into power, Nigeria was having about 28,000 people enrolled into nursing school yearly. When we came in, our target was to increase that number by at least 15,000. But I can tell you that we have surpassed that goal as we now enroll over 130,000 people into nursing school yearly. So, our headache is no longer on Japa as we now have nurses in excess. Mind you, we still have opportunities for our polytechnics to start doing nursing. If that happens, we will potentially be having about 50,000 new students joining the existing number, which will take us close to about 200,000.

Also, we have doubled the number of admitted students for medicine and pharmacy. So, Japa is no longer a problem. Before, TETFund was spending a lot of money sending faculty staff abroad for training. But we said no. We totally cancelled that, because when they sent them abroad like that, 90 per cent of them were not coming back home. So, we instead decided to create centres of excellence in our universities and polytechnics.

With that, those going abroad can simply be trained at home. In other words, we are domesticating the training. We also increased our welfare package for the institutions. You may have heard about our tertiary institution support trust fund through which we give our schools interest-free loans. We have also ensured that both the academic and non-academic staff get their earned allowances on time. So, we have really changed the environment. There is now peace and tranquility in our universities now.

Early last month, the Federal Government scrapped the national policy mandating the use of indigenous languages as the medium of instruction in Nigerian schools. Why was this decision taken?

We have clear data that when children learn in their mother tongue during the early stage of their life, they learn better. The mother tongue policy was made for children to learn in their local languages from Primary 1 to Primary 4. But that wasn’t being done. Now, four out of the six geo-political zones are not even doing it. South-West, South-South, South-East and North-Central are still using English as the language of general instruction.

Secondly, we have 650 unique mother tongue languages in the country. So with our complexity, it will be tough to implement. Number two, the cost. We said three mother tongues: Yoruba, Igbo, and Hausa. But take Borno State as an example. Half of the state speaks Kanuri. They don’t speak Hausa. Come to Lagos and go to Ajegunle, a lot of children there are from the South-East. Their mother tongue should be Igbo. But some of their teachers are from Lagos.

Go to Surulere, half of the students there are Yoruba. But most of their teachers are Igbo. So, where is the mother tongue? So, by pushing the mother tongue campaign, you create more inequality. And with about 650 dialects, we have a culturally diverse society in the country. So, the complexity of implementing the mother tongue is not applicable. It’s possible in China; they simply have Chinese. It’s okay in India; they have Hindi.

Look at the states in the North-West and North-East parts of the country where the policy was over-utilised; we have the students being taught in mother tongue from Primary 1 to JSS 2. But the instructional textbooks are not even written in the mother tongue language. Even if they are, when the students go for national and West African exams, WAEC, NECO, they are served in English. The students were failing. We have clear data on this.

Today, we are talking of a significant out-of-school children burden. But if we continue this mother tongue policy, we will have a second burden of significant out-of-school adolescents. But that is not what we want as a responsible government. That was why we decided to go back to what was done 30 to 40 years ago. It’s not about sentiments, but about the future of our children. We have said we will still make teachers available in the schools to teach Yoruba, Igbo and Hausa. This means the kids will still take those subjects. So, we are not removing mother tongues from our curriculum. But the language of instruction will have to be standardised. Mind you, the mother tongue policy is not feasible. It has been there for almost 15 years, but it has not been done in the South-West, not even in a single school. Same also for South-South, South-East and North-Central. So, who are we deceiving?

But a lot of people have come out to criticise the change, citing how it could lead to loss of some indigenous languages. What do you say to this?

It will never lead to loss of indigenous languages. You have six zones in the country and the larger parts have not been doing it for years. Has it led to loss of indigenous language in those zones? Has there been any decline in the number of people speaking Yoruba in Lagos or Ondo, Ogun, Oyo? Has there also been a reduction in the number of people speaking Igbo in Anambra State or Enugu? Has the number of people speaking Ibibio in Cross River State also reduced? No. When we even talk of the mother tongue language, it is only for Yoruba, Hausa and Igbo. What happens to Efik, Kanuri? What happens to Ibibio? Let’s look at data.

In the past 10 years, has it changed anything? No. We have encouraged parents that it is your duty to teach your kids your mother tongue. Speak it to them at home. They will learn it there. What we have done will not lead to any extinction. It will never happen. We can’t be emotional, sentimental and deceiving ourselves. The future of these kids matters to President Tinubu, and we will give them all the opportunities to excel in life.

How are you carrying stakeholders along with this decision?

It was a decision that was taken at the National Council of Education. I sit as the chairman of the council, but all the education commissioners across the country are there. We voted during our sitting and it was a unanimous ‘yes’. So, all the states were in support. None dissented among them. So, this decision wasn’t mine, but that of the entire national education council. Everybody was carried along, including the governors.

I must say that since we came in, we have had robust relationships with our governors. We have carried them along in all our plans and decisions. That’s why none of the governors has had any reason to complain. Mind you, before we took the mother tongue policy decision, we discussed it extensively at our council meeting in February. We presented the data and said we would consult widely between that month and November, which we did. So, it wasn’t a decision that was taken in a rush. We spent almost eight months discussing it.

The Federal Government recently rolled out a new curriculum for students in secondary schools, including new subjects like coding, robotics, AI, among others. Some believe it is ill-thought because of lack of training of teachers. How are you going about this challenge?

No. Before we deployed the curriculum, we had trained the teachers. We had done that six months earlier. We gave the teachers adequate guidelines and made the curriculum available across many platforms online, and all the schools have rolled it out. More so, we are doing a lot of digital training. In fact, we have invested heavily in teacher training and development. And we have tested the curriculum in one term and everything went well.

Some weeks back, the government shut down 41 unity schools over rising mass abductions in northern Nigeria. What does this portend for education?

Those were difficult decisions that were taken. Ordinarily, our kids must not be out of school. It is something that we take very seriously. But what we have done is to deploy a lot of digital teachings to the affected states to ensure that none of the students misses out on any academic work. So, I can assure you that those schools will open soon. But for security reasons, I won’t be able to tell you when exactly that will be done.

To cover any lost ground for the students, we have also planned that as soon as they resume, they will undergo adult classes on Saturdays to ensure that they don’t miss out on any part of their curriculum. We have set out an arrangement for that, working closely with the state governors. Already, we have designed an academic calendar to work with. Shame to the terrorists. You can see that the government is effectively tackling them. And soon, they will be decimated.

When will the affected schools be reopened and what security measures is the government putting in place to guarantee the safety of students and staff upon resumption?

Other unity schools are fully open. About 80 of them are open. We only shut the ones in the vulnerable areas. We have done all the things needed for their reopening.

The government recently proposed a 40 per cent salary increment for lecturers under ASUU. Can you clarify the structure of this proposal and whether it will apply uniformly across all academic ranks in the universities?

I wouldn’t want to discuss that now. Like I said earlier, it is on the ground and we are working on it. Soon, it will be detailed to the public. Our goal is to make all our academic and non-academic staff continuously happy.

Kindly share this story:

All rights reserved. This material, and other digital content on this website, may not be reproduced, published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed in whole or in part without prior express written permission from PUNCH.

Contact: [email protected]

UPDATE NEWS: Nigerians can now invest ₦2.5million on premium domains and profit about ₦17-₦25Million. All earnings paid in US Dollars. Rather than wonder, 👉 click here to find out how it work (Be sure to ask for evidence of clients that have benefitted from this)

Stay informed and ahead of the curve! Follow The Punch Newspaper on WhatsApp for real-time updates, breaking news, and exclusive content. Don't miss a headline – join now!

Stay in the know—fast. Get instant alerts, breaking headlines, and exclusive stories with the Punch News App. Download now and never miss a beat.