[lg policy] Nigeria: Do You Speak French?

[Harold Schiffman]

Do You Speak French? By Reuben Abati
[image: Reuben Abati]

Reuben Abati

I was on my way back from Botswana, after attending a conference organized
by the Africa Leadership Forum (ALF). This was sometime in the 90s, on that
same trip was Professor Tekena Tamuno, the eminent historian of blessed
memory. We boarded an Air Afrique flight from Johannesburg to Abidjan,
where we were scheduled to join another flight to Lagos. But Air Afrique at
the time had started having problems. Its flights were always delayed,
services were poor, and the airline had become so notorious it eventually
earned the sobriquet: *peut-etre Afrique. Peut-etre *in French meaning
“perhaps or maybe.” On this particular trip, the airline lived up to its
poor reputation.

The flight from Jo’burg to Abidjan was delayed, and we missed our
connecting flight to Lagos. Our first instinct was to go to the Nigerian
Embassy in Abidjan, after the airline had given us hotel accommodation for
the night.  When Professor Tamuno and I arrived at the embassy, the
Ambassador had closed for the day. We left a message. And lo and behold,
the following morning, somebody came from the Embassy to look for us. The
Ambassador, a gentleman to the core, had received our message and he would
like us to stop by at the Embassy before our flight back to Lagos, later in
the day.  A good diplomat on foreign posting will always look out for the
interest of his or her country’s citizens under whatever circumstances. We
were impressed. But this is not the point of this article. It is as the
title suggests, about French language and the need for Nigeria to take the
teaching and the learning of the language more seriously and actively
promote this in our educational institutions.

When the emissary from the Embassy arrived at our hotel, he reportedly
searched everywhere for us. We were having breakfast in the restaurant when
I suddenly heard the announcement on the Public Address system that two
Nigerians in the hotel had a visitor from the Nigerian Embassy. I informed
Professor Tamuno, and he wondered whether I could speak French. My French
was still good in those days, but French is such a precise and poetic
language that does not allow any form of stammering. And if you don’t use
it regularly, you could lose it or become so rusty that you dare not speak
it again. Persons who speak French fluently cannot tolerate any form of
incoherence; one funny look at you, you’d have no option but to shut up.
So, I willingly lost my spoken French. But when I listen, I understand what
is being said.

I have had many more memorable encounters about the importance of French as
a second language while attending international conferences and in the
course of my work, at a time, as a government official. Virtually every
international event has French as a major language of communication. More
people in the world speak Mandarin, Spanish and may be Russian.  But French
is not just the ninth most widely spoken language; by more than 200 million
people; it is a language of international relations, and it is the second
official language. At international meetings, there are translators who
help non-speakers of the main language to follow discussions, but French
vocabulary and syntax are imbued with such special cadence that is not
fully conveyed in translation. Oftentimes, the translators can be annoying.
It is not just the same thing.

For many countries, teaching and learning another language is a matter of
strategic policy.  Countries seek to connect with their neighbours and
strategic partners through language. It is instructive that in the United
States, Spanish and Mandarin are the two other most popular languages, the
learning and teaching of which is deliberately encouraged. The United
States has a large Spanish speaking population; its neighbours in Latin
America also speak Spanish; the promotion of Spanish as a language in the
United States builds many cultural bridges.  Mandarin is also popular
because of the increasing population of Chinese-Americans.

Is there in Nigeria any active policy to strategically promote language as
a vehicle of integration and development? Nigeria is surrounded by
Francophone countries: how many Nigerians speak or understand French?  When
you travel to any of these Francophone countries, or even to the Portuguese
speaking ones, you can’t fail to notice the large number of French-speaking
persons who can also speak English. While our neighbours make an effort to
learn English, making it easy to relate with them, we practically don’t
make any effort to understand their own language. And as a country, we are
short-changing ourselves. It is often so embarrassing to see many of our
Foreign Affairs Ministry officials not being able to speak any other
language apart from English, or not being proficient enough, even when they
can.  When Nigerians attend international conferences within the region,
they rely on translators during formal sessions and thereafter they just
stand around playing deaf and dumb.  Almost all the Presidents in our
neighbouring Francophone countries speak English. The day we have a
Nigerian President who can have a decent conversation in French, we should
slaughter a cow! We need to take a second look at the policy on the
teaching of languages in our school system.

In 1996, the General Sani Abacha administration introduced a language
policy declaring French as Nigeria’s second official language. The
objective as stated in the National Policy on Education (2004) was mainly
to “smoothen interaction with our neighbours” by promoting the French
language at the primary and secondary school level. But since then, that
policy has been only on paper.  The teaching of French language was first
introduced at the secondary school level in Nigeria, around 1956, at King’s
College, Lagos and Government College, Ibadan.

Later, it became a subject of study at the Universities of Ibadan, Ife,
UNN, and Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria and over the years, other Nigerian
universities established Departments of French or Modern Languages.
Colleges of Education also later started offering French, but only as a
subject to be combined with a Nigerian language. At the secondary school
level, it was however treated as an optional subject, and it was not taught
at all at the primary school level. If there had been a determined effort
to promote French as a second official language, by now so much progress
would have been made.

There are over 2 million Nigerians reportedly living in Cote D’Ivoire alone
and more in the other Francophone countries in West Africa, particularly
Niger, Chad, Togo, Cameroun, Mali and Burkina Faso. Nigeria may be the
biggest market in Africa, but access to other West African markets makes
that market even bigger.  There are millions of Nigerians travelling all
over West Africa, engaged in profitable commerce on a daily basis. Some of
them pick up the French language out of necessity but a properly executed
language policy can fast-track Nigeria’s integration with the sub-region,
encourage regional commerce and promote co-operation and understanding.  We
need that integration if indeed Africa is the centre-piece of our foreign
policy, beginning with our immediate neighbours. Other West African
countries and even French-speaking African countries like Gabon and Burundi
are consciously promoting the learning of English. Their stated reason:
Pragmatism!

Language connects people. Language defines and strengthens. I have seen
situations whereby in the absence of French or English as a connecting
language, Nigerians who speak Fulfude, Hausa and Yoruba connect so
instantly with their West African brothers and sisters who speak the same
languages.  Nigeria cannot effectively perform its leadership role in the
sub-region if its people do not speak or understand the language of their
neighbours. General Sani Abacha was certainly right on this point of making
French, Nigeria’s default second language. ECOWAS by the way, is working on
a West African Highway Project, from Lagos to Nouackchott. Is that meant to
be a highway of the deaf and the dumb, trapped in cultural spaces?

The greatest beneficiaries of linguistic integration will probably be
ordinary people. Multi-lingual Nigerians do better than their mono-lingual
compatriots, relatively speaking. To get certain international
appointments, you need that extra language. A friend told me that Akinwunmi
Adesina, former Minister of Agriculture, stole the show at the preliminary
screenings for his current job as AfDB President, when he switched to
French and spoke with such power of articulation and insight. There are
thousands more. We need to produce more Nigerians like that. And we need
those other Nigerians too, who can sell whatever from Cotonou to Lome to
Niger, Chad, Abidjan and Cameroun, undeterred by language barriers,
switching linguistic codes with ease.

And it is better to catch them young.  Children learn and absorb language
almost by osmosis. We need to start preparing our children for
international life, within the region and beyond, by teaching them French
and for those who have the capacity, Nigerian languages and other languages
as well.  We must begin to prepare our future Presidents of international
corporations, and Nigerians who will also, in future become Secretary
Generals of the United Nations and other multilateral institutions. The
obsession with wealth and the transient is making us lose focus as a
country. Our greatest asset remains our children, the young, untainted
ones, who need to be captured and built up, before they get sucked into the
prevalent, abnormal normative value system in the country.

By now, it should be clear that this is not just about the teaching of
French as a second official language but more about the gaps and the chaos
in Nigeria’s education system.  Our disruptive governance process, the
forever-begin-again culture of governance, truncates so many things, and
the education process gets poorly served. I have dealt with aspects of this
in earlier writings and I just want to repeat the point that the education
of the Nigerian child and the re-schooling of society are so tied to all
matters of progress and development that we just cannot stop talking about
them.  In the same manner in which we promote regional integration, we
should also use language to bind the country together. Nigerian languages
should be taught in schools as compulsory subjects. Where language barriers
do not exist, people are always willing to listen, and in a world where the
wisdom of the tribe prevails, we should encourage people to talk and
listen, and remove barriers.

There are many young Nigerians studying abroad whose parents are spending a
fortune to get them to plug into this global trend but even if those
children speak all the languages of the world, they may be lost to the
country forever. They have little or no attachment to Nigeria’s education
system and their parents may not be keen about linking them to a natal
origin where electricity remains a problem, infrastructure deficit
continues to grow and the future is permanently uncertain. This is why in
simple terms, in this matter, the change process must begin at home at all
levels.  In the end (you see?), everything is linked, but we are optimistic
that all will be well, because after all, we are Nigerians: we manage to be
happy in every situation. * Meilleurs voeux.*


*http://www.tv360nigeria.com/do-you-speak-french-by-reuben-abati/
<http://www.tv360nigeria.com/do-you-speak-french-by-reuben-abati/>*


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