The hypocrisy surrounding the debate on using mother tongue as the medium of instruction at the basic level is as fascinating as it is bewildering. When the news broke that the Federal Government had scrapped the mother-tongue policy in early education, my first reaction was confusion. I found myself rereading the headline, wondering when such a policy even took root in the first place. It sounded more like a ban on a proposal that never made it past the pages of a forgotten file. Yet, to my surprise, the policy had existed quietly since 1977, tucked away in the National Policy on Education under the military administration of Olusegun Obasanjo. A policy that many, including myself never truly encountered in real life was suddenly resurrected in public conversation as though it had defined our educational journey.
The policy required that early education be delivered in the mother tongue or language of the immediate community, while also urging children to learn one of the three major Nigerian languages. English was to take center stage only from the upper primary classes. In theory, this sounded progressive and culturally empowering. But in practice, it lived mostly as an idea, not a reality. The few states that attempted implementation struggled with lack of trained teachers, inadequate teaching materials, and widespread societal bias towards English. Not surprisingly, the areas where it was attempted recorded mixed outcomes. Scholars like Jim Cummins have long argued that children learn best when taught in a familiar language because “language is not just a tool for communication but a tool for thinking.” However, the Nigerian experience reveals that good theory can still stumble in the face of weak infrastructure and limited political commitment.
What is even more intriguing is that this long-dormant 1977 policy coexisted with a far bolder and more ambitious National Language Policy introduced in 2022 under President Muhammadu Buhari, which made indigenous-language instruction mandatory from early childhood through Primary Six. Yet, like its predecessor, it slipped quietly past the attention of most Nigerians. Somehow, its cancellation has generated more noise, passion, lawsuits, and moral grandstanding than its actual existence ever did. It suggests a peculiar truth about public discourse: sometimes, we mourn what we never valued simply because it is taken away. Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria (HURIWA) now threatens a class-action suit, backed by over 200 lawyers and cultural organizations, insisting that scrapping the policy is nothing short of “cultural and educational suicide.” The group cites countries like Japan, South Korea, and France, where children learn in their native languages and excel. Yet, in a striking irony, many of the loudest voices defending the policy are the same people who send their children to private schools where English-only instruction is not only assured but paid for handsomely.
For me, one of the most glaring flaws of the policy is its romantic assumption that within a community, there exists a single homogenous mother tongue. Nigeria is anything but homogenous. In places like Minna, Hausa may be widely spoken but is not the mother tongue for many natives. What happens to the Nupe-speaking child, the Gwari-speaking child, or the Yoruba and Igbo children who also find themselves in these classrooms? Expecting teachers, many of whom learned their subjects in English to suddenly teach technical concepts like numeracy and early literacy in multiple indigenous languages is more chaotic than revolutionary. And when examinations remain firmly in English, the children taught exclusively in local languages are placed at a structural disadvantage, forced to catch up later in a system that measures competence through English fluency.
The practical challenges are enormous. How many teachers today can properly teach in the full range of Nigeria’s indigenous languages? How many textbooks exist in these languages? How many teacher-training colleges prioritize multilingual pedagogy? The 2022 policy leaned heavily on research that children understand better when taught in their mother tongue, a position supported by UNESCO and decades of developmental linguistics. Yet, Nigeria’s reality complicates this. English, though foreign, has become the bridge that connects our 500-plus languages. Without it, national communication would fracture. In fact, if colonialism unintentionally gifted us anything of enduring value, it was a unifying language that spares us the impossibility of selecting one indigenous language as national lingua franca without triggering ethnic upheaval. Telling villagers to teach only in their local languages ignores the presence of migrants, settlers, inter-ethnic marriages, and the simple fact that children grow up in increasingly blended communities.
Yet, while I disagree with the practicality of the policy, I understand the emotional appeal. Mother tongue carries memories, identity, and cultural pride. People feel protective of it because language roots us. Still, in a fast-globalizing world, early exposure to English, and indeed other international languages, opens doors. This does not negate the importance of preserving local languages. Encouragingly, the National Universities Commission recently approved the study of Nupe and Tiv in Nigerian universities, a step toward preserving endangered languages through higher academic scholarship. Such languages can thrive alongside English, not in competition with it.
English remains one of the most economically valuable languages in the world. It allows Nigerians to interact far beyond their immediate communities and compete globally. If local languages are to survive meaningfully, parents must nurture them at home, create literature in them, and pass them down intentionally. What has been masquerading as cultural preservation through policy has, in fact, been a system that disadvantages the children of the poor. Children whose only exposure to education is the public system where policies are implemented poorly, if at all, while elites quietly secure their own children’s future with English-dominant schooling at home and abroad. It is little wonder that the policy’s cancellation appears, to many, as a necessary correction rather than a cultural betrayal.
The standing provisions of the 2013 National Policy on Education had already made mother-tongue instruction a recommendation for the early years, with English introduced progressively from Primary Four. The 2022 policy simply expanded this. But both policies shared the same fate: they lived on paper, revered in theory, but starved of the structural resources that would have made them meaningful. Without textbooks, teacher training, funding, monitoring, or clear interpretation of terms like “monolingual community,” implementation was always doomed to be inconsistent and uneven. Most teachers themselves were unaware of the full guidelines, and many schools ignored them altogether.
Meanwhile, the recent reversal by the Federal Government has ignited debates that feel both overdue and performative. The Minister of Education cited poor exam performance among students taught primarily in indigenous languages, referencing WAEC, NECO, and JAMB data. Defenders of the policy dispute this, arguing that the sample size was too small to draw sweeping conclusions. Critics worry about losing cultural identity; proponents insist on academic competitiveness. The argument, in many ways, mirrors Nigeria itself: torn between tradition and global relevance, between emotional attachment and pragmatic survival.
In the end, perhaps the greatest lesson is that language policy cannot be sustained by sentiment alone. It must be built on infrastructure, training, planning, and a clear sense of Nigeria’s linguistic complexity. Until then, scrapping the mother-tongue policy may not be the intellectual betrayal some claim it to be, but rather a long-overdue acknowledgment of what has always been true: we cannot build an educational future on a foundation that never truly existed.
Bagudu can be reached at bagudumohammed15197@gmail.com or on 0703 494 3575.
