RIVERS STATE READERS PROJECT POSITION PAPER

GOVERNMENT OF RIVERS STATE OF NIGERIA

Rivers State Readers Project         

www.riversstate-readersproject.blogspot.com E-mail: risreproj@gmail.com; tenyia@riversstate.gov.ng Our Ref: RSRP/CD/Vol.1/2 All replies to be addressed to the Executive Secretary

Block ‘C’ 5th Floor Room 513 Secretariat Complex P.M.B. 5098 Port Harcourt, NIGERIA Date: 28 June 2011

POSITION PAPER ON INDIGENOUS LANGUAGE EDUCATION

I. PREAMBLE

The Federal Government has approved orthographies of fourteen (14) Rivers State languages. The fourteen (14) languages are now nationally accredited as “Nigerian languages spoken in Rivers State”, viz: Abuan, Degema, Echie, Egbema, Egene, Ekpeye, Eleme, Gokana, Ibani, Kana, Ndoni, Odual, Ogba, and Okrika. They were published by the Nigerian Educational Research and Development Council (NERDC) Sheda, Abuja, in volumes IX and X of the ORTHOGRAPHIES OF NIGERIAN LANGUAGES MANUAL. (Ikwere, Kalabari and Obolo had been approved earlier, bringing the number of ratified indigenous languages in Rivers State to seventeen [17]).

II. FEDERAL GOVERNMENT POSITION

The Federal Government said:

The National Council on Education has approved the use of these orthographies. Therefore, the orthographies were ratified as standardized systems of writing of these languages with the ultimate aim of stimulating the production of materials to be used in schools for reading, writing, literature and learning.

The development of the orthographies of the fourteen languages of Rivers State by the Rivers State Readers Project (RSRP) with the technical partnership of the Nigerian Educational Research and Development Council (NERDC) is an outstanding effort aimed at language standardization and development.

The Rivers State Readers Project (RSRP) in its proactive approach to the development of indigenous languages conceived and executed the project for the development of orthographies of the 14 languages and their respective curriculum. The NERDC as a regulatory body not only applauded these efforts, but complimented them technically and facilitated their ratification.

NERDC encourages state governments and relevant agencies to take up the challenge of developing their indigenous languages to meet the requirements of the National Policy on Education (NPE) for educational growth and overall development. In these regards, the Rivers State Readers Project is outstanding. It is a continuation of the pioneering giant stride by Late Professor Kay Williamson of blessed memory.

Rivers State, by this development, has adopted the UNESCO statements of recognition of languages and multilingualism as essential to the eradication of extreme poverty and

hunger, achieving universal basic education, responding to HIV/AIDS/Malaria, environmental sustainability and enjoyment of human rights.

The National Council on Education, which is made up of the Minister of Education and the Commissioners of Education of the 36 States of the federation, formally approved these orthographies, giving credence to the technical and professional expertise of the work.

III. LANGUAGE EDUCATION LAW IN RIVERS STATE

Founded in 1970 as the Rivers Readers Project, the Project became moribund until a new board was inaugurated in 2008 to take up the challenge of developing the seventeen (17) recognized Rivers State languages for Federal Government approval and use in the Rivers State school system as well as general communication.

The re-establishment of the Rivers State Readers Project in 2008 was empowered by “The Rivers State Education (Teaching of Indigenous Languages) Law 2003” which provides that:

“The teaching of indigenous languages is made compulsory in all pre-primary, primary, and junior secondary schools in Rivers State. The Ministry of Education shall ensure that the teaching of these indigenous languages forms part of the academic curricula of all the affected schools.

The Ministry shall cause the local languages to be one of the subjects examined at the end of each term or year in the First School Leaving Certificate (FSLC) and the Junior Secondary School Certificate (JSSC) examinations. The Ministry of Education shall ensure that teachers are trained to cater for all the schools through workshops and compressed certificate courses on local languages spoken in the State in universities or other institutions approved by the Ministry.”

We do sincerely appreciate and applaud the efforts of the Governor Amaechi Administration in resuscitating the Rivers State Readers Project to its current enviable national and international status. The profile of the Rivers State Readers Project continues to blossom as evidenced by the commendations by the Federal Government above, and more importantly, internationally, we are happy to confirm that:

“The Rivers State Readers Project was listed / cited in the 2010 International Journal on ‘Evidence- and Practice-based Advocacy Brief’ published by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Institute for Lifelong Learning, Hamburg, Germany. It ranked 2nd to Professor Aliyu Fafunwa’s Yoruba language ‘Six-Year Primary (Ife Mother-tongue Education Project) carried out at the Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife.’ None other was chosen out of the scores of language projects across the country, Nigeria, reported by the Federal Ministry of Education. This is an international recognition of the efforts of the Rivers State Readers Project.”

IV. FURTHER JUSTIFICATIONS FOR INDIGENOUS LANGUAGE EDUCATION

Speaking with great foresight, in the aftermath of the Nigerian Civil War as the Federal Commissioner of Education in 1971, Chief A.Y. Eke said: “The next cardinal principle which ought to govern our education is character-training about which much has been said by so many in recent times and especially in these days when it has become fashionable for many a school child to be violent, irresponsible and disrespectful. Character-training (through the mother-tongue should at home and school include) moral and civic values.” (The parenthesis is mine).

The reason for his policy advocacy was that pre-Civil War education system in Nigeria had a measure of observation of youth character in the forms of integrity, rectitude, good initiative, discipline, respect for constituted authority, etc. After the War, with the advent of the military, these values disappeared leading up to examinations fraud, very poor standard of education, cultism, armed violence, kidnapping, restiveness, and pervasive corruption, etc. Bad character traits like stealing, lying, truancy, immorality, dishonesty, etc need to be tackled by the re-introduction of traditional values via early mother-tongue education.

The out-come of the 2009 Garden City Literary Festival held in Port Harcourt in October 2009 is seen roundly as an advocacy for mother-tongue education in Rivers State and the Nigerian nation. The guest speaker, Professor Ngugi Wa Thiong’o (the international literary icon), renewed his earlier prescription for creative writers in Africa to write in their mother-tongue as he has chosen to do in his native Gikuyu language (of Kenya). He lamented the adverse effect the English Language has had on many writers who are unable to write in their mother-tongue as demonstrated by a writing test he conducted at the Port Harcourt event. He holds the view that perception between languages has nothing to do with the inherent powers of languages but that such thinking has been brought about by a historical process – colonial history to be precise.

Professor Ngugi Wa Thiong’o shares the same concerns with the UNESCO about the low utilization of our indigenous languages in our national life. The current UNESCO Director-General, Koichiro Matsuura (a Japanese), pointed out that the death of a language leads to the disappearance of many forms of intangible cultural heritage, especially the invaluable heritage of traditions and oral expressions of the community that spoke it – from poems and legends to proverbs and jokes. He said the loss of languages is also detrimental to humanity’s grasp of biodiversity, as they transmit much knowledge about nature and the universe.

The situation in Nigeria, it has been observed, is that we have a generation that is neither proficient in their mother-tongue nor in the English language, which is akin to moving towards a zero language option (pidgin?). The reason being that we are scandalized by the practice in primary schools which punishes one child for speaking in mother-tongue, and extols the other for speaking in English. The humiliation and negativity attached to native languages in the teaching/learning process by the so-called educated elites, indigenous language development skeptics and some education policy makers should be done away with. This is because the positive affirmation of English language as a means of intellectual productivity and the (pervasive) criminalization of mother-tongue for the same process has, for long, been the bane of development of these languages.

The lead speaker at the 2009 Garden City Literary Festival sees this as an obscurantist colonial hang-over and as such there is the urgent need to change the status quo so that our indigenous languages will be the language of commerce, administration, politics, education, industry, jurisprudence and international communication. This is the lesson of Ngugi’s postulations. It is a call for linguistic pride and nationalism. And the way out of this linguistic suicide is to start using our own languages as the medium of instruction in our nursery and primary schools.

The 2009 Garden City Literary Festival, which was sponsored by our own Governor Amaechi, a lover of literary excellence, applauded the nationally recognized and internationally uncontroverted “Ife experiment” conducted by the Late Professor Aliyu Babatunde Fafunwa, using his Yoruba mother-tongue to teach children from primary one to six, which showed that the pupils did quite well. Since then, Fafunwa had argued on the possibility of teaching

mathematics and science subjects in our indigenous languages since his experience at the “Ife-six-year primary project” showed clearly that children will cope better with mathematics if they are taught in their mother-tongue.

In summarizing the out-come of the 2009 Literary Festival, the lead speaker asserts that there is nothing wrong in using our local languages to teach from nursery to university level. Such languages can be further enriched through extensive borrowing as done by English to make up for their deficiencies and inadequacies. He suggested that all our classic creative works, especially Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Soyinka’s Death and the Kings Horseman, and others, should be translated into these languages to boost them. (ref Daily Sun newspaper, 30/10/2009).

Professor Ngugi Wa Thiong’o was not alone in his advocacy. His international outcry was echoed nationally in Nigeria by the chairman, board of directors of the publishing house, Dr Lekan Are, who lamented that the failures being recorded now in the various examinations (WAEC, NECO, JAMB, etc) were unheard of way back when children only came in contact with the foreign language when they were six years old and above. Dr Are, therefore, canvassed that children be taught their mother-tongue to a certain age before they became exposed to a foreign language as the only panacea to the children's learning problems.

He also blamed children's inability to speak their mother-tongue on parents, who think it elitist for their children to speak only in English rather than their mother-tongue. Children coming in contact with a foreign language from age six and above would enhance rather than hinder their cognitive abilities, and even hasten their understanding of the foreign language.

Dr Lekan Are was joined in his clarion call by the foremost linguist and Yoruba author, Professor Akinwunmi Isola, who stated that unless a child was competent in the mother-tongue he might not be able to acquire a foreign language. He noted that Nigerian children who presumed to speak only foreign language were the worse users of the English language. He also tied mother-tongue to the acquisition of culture and values because language is the vehicle through which these two are conveyed or transmitted. He said we have abandoned our mother-tongue, albeit it is through the mother-tongue that you can acquire culture and values. Culture comes first through our language.  (ref Guardian Newspaper, 29/6/09).

The presidency of the Federal Republic of Nigeria also lent its voice to this policy direction. Our late President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua launched the Microsoft Language Localization Programme in Abuja in June 2009 and described language as strategic to national development. He called on Nigerians to take advantage of the opportunities provided by Microsoft's local language programme to preserve and promote the country's mother languages, “while benefiting from continuing IT advancements." Microsoft Nigeria had proved that language couldn't be a barrier to technology access.

By far the greatest advocate of the development and use of mother-tongue was and still remains the UNESCO. It was UNESCO that commissioned and co-funded with Ford Foundation the research that identified the 17 recognized languages of Rivers State in 1970. And recently, in 2006, Hubert J. Charles, UNESCO’s then Country Representative in Nigeria said:

 “We must… understand the term ‘language’ in its fullest sense. {Citing a renowned anthropologist, Davis} UNESCO notes that: “A language isn’t just a body of vocabulary or a set of grammatical rules. It is a flash of the human spirit, a vehicle through which the soul of a particular culture comes into the material world. When we lose a language we lose a

vital part of the human spirit. English … enjoys considerable support from parents and teachers in the belief that it is an important door to modernism and success. That the ability to speak English in our globalized world constitutes an advantage is neither in doubt nor being challenged.

    

What is certainly not true is that knowledge and use of one or even two indigenous languages militates against one being able to master English or French. In fact, the view espoused by UNESCO holds that mastery of these Western languages is more often than not facilitated by mastery of one’s indigenous language. Educators, particularly at the pre- and primary school levels, will need to be careful that they are not seen as having lost the argument that the use and mastery of the mother-tongue actually assists in the acquisition of English, French and other Western languages.”

The TIME international magazine of July 1977 had raised an alarm, saying that: “Half the world’s languages are faced with extinction … unless we wake up to the problem, we stand to lose up to 95% of our languages in the coming century. Indigenous peoples are not waiting for the slow death of linguistic extinction. They are speaking out to try to save their endangered tongues.” And just recently on Thursday, 3/6/11 we read the editorial of ThisDay Newspaper applauding Governor Peter Obi of Anambra State for “canvassing the revival of Igbo language and tradition (and urging) other governors to take a cue from Governor Obi’s good example. Beyond teaching or learning the local language in schools, parents should make efforts to communicate with their children in their mother tongue at home. A local language that is not spoken, sooner or later dies… the native tongue of a person expresses his or her essence and (cultural) identity.”

The criticality of mother-tongue as a matter of life and death was decisively demonstrated by no less a powerful national army than the Israeli Defence Force (IDF). In “Operation Thunder: The Entebbe Raid, Israelis’ Own Story”, Yehuda Ofer (1976:121,124) a military journalist said:

“The fighters who had burst into the hall shouted warnings in Hebrew to the captives to lie on the ground and they then wiped out the Palestinian Arab terrorists in the hall within a few seconds with crackling volleys of automatic fire… Those who hugged the floor were not hit. The (Israeli) covering force succeeded in that very moment in silencing the firing from the tower and the first of the hostages began to emerge from the doorway of the terminal to race to the awaiting aircraft.” Those who did not understand Hebrew perished in “seconds.”

Suffice it, therefore, to re-echo the wise words of one of Africa’s foremost linguists, Professor Emeritus Ayo Bamgbose (1993) that: “When all is said and done, the fate of the endangered language may well lie in the hands of the owners of the language themselves and in their will to make it survive.” This is more so because as Samuel Johnson has lamented: “I am always sorry when any language is lost, because languages are the pedigree of nations.”

V. WAY FORWARD

We believe the future is very bright for the development and deployment of our indigenous language skills in the Rivers State school system and general communication as strongly advocated by UNESCO and the Federal Government of Nigeria. In fact, Urhobo and Efik are now being written in NECO along with Ibo, Hausa & Yoruba. We believe some Rivers languages will join soon as we develop the curriculum in technical collaboration with NERDC!

The Rivers State Readers Project has continued to work on this project with a view to addressing the 5 distinct segments of the Project, namely: the orthography development / deployment, curricula development, writing of language books, training of language teachers and deployment of language teachers to use the materials to teach in the schools. And we were committed to kick-starting all the segments of the Project in the typical “project management critical path network style.” We were working on the orthographies and advancing towards the curricula development and book writing when we reached an agreement with the Ignatius Ajuru University of Education on training of the teachers. After a careful review of our proposed course content and course description, the Vice-Chancellor of UOE replied in the affirmative. Similarly, the Rivers State Universal Basic Education Board was working in tandem with us on the prospects of training and deployment of teachers in the school system.

For the development of the curricula, NERDC officially confirmed that: 

“The development of language curricula is the responsibility of NERDC through her Language Development Centre with State governments as collaborators and partners. All stages of the language curriculum development process i.e. Planning, Writing, Critique, Editorial, presentation to Joint Consultative Committee on Education (JCCE) and the National Council on Education (NCE) shall be facilitated by NERDC with input from the Rivers State Government through the Rivers State Readers Project office. The Rivers State Government as collaborator shall fund the project fully. Upon receiving NCE approval for the curricula, the Rivers State Government shall print and distribute the curricula for use in schools in the state. Proposals detailing the curriculum development processes and stages and cost implications for each stage” have been forwarded already.

Government has recently assured us of its support for the development of our mother-tongue; the bedrock of our pristine cultural heritage, moral values, positive traditional ethos and socio-economic development as symbolized by the Rivers State annual cultural carnival (CARNIRIV), which is actually an adjunct to the development of our indigenous languages - the foundation of the people’s cultural heritage.

To mark the official take-off of the matching of our giant strides in educational infrastructure and cultural development with an even stronger commitment to the development of our Rivers State indigenous language heritage, which is the lasting foundation for socio-economic development, let the Rivers State Readers Project fivefold cycle (of orthography deployment, curricula development, writing of language books, training of language teachers and deployment of language teachers to use the materials to teach in the schools) commence full swing.

TONY ENYIA; PhD, MNIM        
EXECUTIVE SECRETARY /CEO                                                                                               RIVERS STATE READERS PROJECT                                                                     
12th AUGUST, 2011.