The Nation Newspaper

Category: Adebayo Lamikanra

Highways are happy ways (III)

Those of my generation, that is, the baby boomers as well as those who are one or two generations younger are likely to recognise the phrase used as the title of this piece and others before it. For those who have forgotten, it was part of an advertisement which for several seasons ran on all media every year at Christmas time. It was sponsored by a plastics manufacturing firm which, like many such companies, has long become a victim of the malaise which has assailed the Nigerian manufacturing sector, is now extinct. The essence of that advertisement was to discourage people from driving too fast in the time leading up to Christmas. However, I doubt that this advert made much difference to its audience because the prevailing belief in those days and even now, is that the demons which inhabit our roads become especially spiteful and uncommonly ravenous at the period when an old year was being rung out. Beware, the dangers of the ember months! That remains a constant admonition so that all those travelling along any Nigerian road during that extended period are made aware of the dangers to which they were exposed. One would have thought that drivers were being urged to take extra care whilst using the road. Wrong! At least from the point of popular belief. The real message was that everyone was to ensure that they were in good standing with those tempestuous spirits that ruled the highways before making any trip on them. That popular jingle which became characteristic of the Christmas period of those days is now terminally quiet but its spirit lives on even as the echoes created by it continue to reverberate right up till now.

You really do not have to be acquainted with laws of Physics to appreciate that your power to control a moving vehicle diminishes as the speed at which the vehicle is moving increases. It is really a common sense thing but anyone who travels along the highways in Nigeria soon observes that this piece of common sense is only conspicuous by its absence from Nigerian roads. The contempt for caution is so prominent here that it is apparent that virtually every Nigerian who sits behind the wheel of any vehicle is instantly transformed into a spirit that is every bit as capricious if not as vicious as the spirits which in popular imagination, are supposed to inhabit the road. Nigerians are notoriously lax about keeping time for any appointment but when you see any of us driving on the road, you are given the impression that everyone is in a hurry to keep an appointment for which they whizz along the road at break neck speed. This is why accidents here are often, if not invariably described as ghastly. Many years ago, a Nigerian lady who lived in Britain was trying to describe the scene of an accident that she had seen on a British road. She was so badly shaken at the sight of the mangled vehicles at the scene of the accident that the only way she felt she could effectively convey her feelings was to describe it as a ‘Nigerian’ accident. The last time she had seen anything so horrifying was back home in Nigeria where such an appalling scene was not uncommon. Another aspect of vehicular accidents in Nigeria is that the badly mangled carcasses of the vehicle involved in an accident may remain in place, apparently forgotten long enough to be the cause of another accident. After all, the spirits are in a constant state of hunger and need to be fed. In the end therefore, those spirits conjured out of nothing in our deadly imagination are held responsible for any accident. In this scenario, the driver who may be high on some potent distilled spirits or the fumes coming off some notorious plant substance is treated like a victim of something beyond his puny human strength. You will be amazed as to how many of the drivers involved in these accidents blithely walk away unscathed from the mess they have created.

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Whilst it is true that driving at high speed can be exhilarating, it would be extremely foolish to ignore the dangers associated with it. For a start, just how fit for purpose are the vehicles which take to our roads at any time of day or night? The sober response to that query is that not many of them would be allowed out onto any European road. For example, in Britain, there is the dreaded MOT test which every vehicle above three years old has to pass before they are given a license to be on the road, any road at all. This test is repeated at every subsequent three year interval and any vehicle that fails the test at any point in time is immediately committed to a junk yard where it is permanently removed from circulation and scrapped. Here, we are charged for something called the road worthiness test. All you are required to do to pass the test is pay the prescribed fee whenever you renew your annual vehicle licence and you are good to go even if your vehicle is precariously balanced on three wheels at the time your renewed vehicle licence is being handed over to you. Given our shoddy vehicle licensing process, it is safe to assume that more than half of the vehicles plying Nigerian roads at any given time have no business being there at all as they are the potential cause of an accident just by being on the road at all. This is not taking into consideration the number of vehicles which have been in the care of a typical Nigerian mechanic for any length of time.

The Nigerian mechanic is qualified to be assigned to a special species outside the human race and that is a fact, an indisputable one. I wonder who the first Nigerian mechanic was because whoever he was, he deserves a posthumous award for sheer bravery and enterprise. How did he get it into his head to take on the spirits which were in control of the vehicle engine and be initiated into their mysteries? It is unlikely that our first mechanic underwent any formal course of training. More than a century after him, the Nigerian mechanic still lacks formal training and everything considered is on the verge of becoming an endangered species. Not long ago, a mechanic apprenticeship was well sought after. Not so anymore. A mechanic workshop is, these days, a rather lonely place, denuded as it is of aspiring mechanics. The profession, if you can call it that, has no appeal to the youths who in the absence of a tertiary education diploma prefer to become apprenticed to an internet fraudster or put the rest of us in constant danger by becoming an Okada rider. After all, he does not need any period of apprenticeship for that.

The typical Nigerian mechanic approaches his tasks by feel as he is severely limited by the simplicity of his tools and his limited knowledge of the mechanics of the engine he works on. He therefore has a cavalier attitude to his work. He is not averse to simply tossing out any defective parts or just replacing them with something that looks like the real thing as long as the vehicle he is working on can leave his workshop under its own steam. His task is not made any easier by the proliferation of the inferior or even outrightly fake replacement parts with which he carries out the needed repairs on the vehicles in his care. Today, the vast majority of vehicles on Nigerian roads have been imported after years of admittedly pampered use in Europe or the USA. For all that, they are not new, some of them being more than ten years old and no longer able to pass the fitness tests in their country of origin. These days, the spare parts needed to make those vehicles fit for service on our roads are also described as fairly used. I find it illogical that used spark plugs are preferable to brand new ones but if you put your vehicle in the hands of a mechanic in Nigeria, that is the logic you must be prepared to accept. The reality therefore is that your vehicle is not fit for the purpose of being driven on the road at any speed let alone the high speeds at which vehicles are propelled along our ricketty roads.

February 8, 2026
A word from Davos

But for a quirk of fate, you would have been forgiven for having never heard of the existence of a small town in the Swiss Alps called Davos. After all, it is no more than a ski resort with less than ten thousand permanent inhabitants offering no interest for anyone in Nigeria or anywhere else in the world for that matter. But Davos, for all its previous obscurity, is now famous the world over. This is because since January 1971, at the invitation of Dr. Schwarb, a German academic, stakeholders in various aspects of the ordering of the global economy have descended on the otherwise sleepy village of Davos. For a few January days, Davos takes its place in the wintry sun as the most influential CEOs in the world hold discussions with each other, with heads of state, academics and other groups of people who have been recognised as contributors to the global economic order.

According to Perplexity AI, the guest list at the last Davos meeting which occupied a good part of last week included about 3,000 participants from roughly 130 countries. This included around 400 senior political leaders and more than 60–65 heads of state or government. Roughly 800–850 CEOs, founders and chairpersons of major global companies. Dr. Okonjo-Iweala in her capacity as the Director General of the World Trade Organisation was also present but not representing Nigeria at that venue. This distinguished guest list is a far cry from the few CEOs of European companies who were invited to the first Davos forum in 1971. Now, private jets of every magnificent description annually turn all the airports around Davos into a massive jet parking lot for the world’s richest CEOs, heads of state and others with enough clout to operate expensive private jets, for a few days. They come on this yearly pilgrimage to meet and discuss what exactly?

One would have thought that their major preoccupation would have been to jointly improve the flow of world trade with a view to decreasing poverty in those parts of the world where degrading poverty is making a mockery of human existence. These are places where people have no choice but to battle on, on less than $2 a day. Their attention should also be turned on people in the rich countries who are marginalised to the level of those wretches facing anonymity and extinction in the poorest parts of the world. What is the use of all those words poured out in Davos every year if a significant minority of the world is left staring into the abyss of extreme economic disadvantage whilst a miniscule minority swims in an ocean of unimaginable wealth?

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I became interested in the World Economic Forum (WEF) about ten years ago when I came across an article on Davos by Oxfam, the British organisation which has dedicated itself to global charity and is currently active in more than seventy countries all around the world. Founded in 1942 at the height of WWII, Oxfam has dedicated itself to fighting poverty and injustice with the conviction that both have their root in inequality. The focus on the reduction of inequality will be followed by the reduction of both poverty and injustice and the world would become a better place for most of her inhabitants. Every year, in the leadup to the WEF meeting in Davos, Oxfam publishes the state of global inequality using one vital statistic, the number of the richest people in the world whose wealth is balanced by the number of the poorest people in the world. About a decade ago, Oxfam reported that eighty-seven of the world’s richest people held as much wealth as half of the number of the poorest people in the world. That number is put into some perspective if we imagine that those eighty-seven persons will fit comfortably into a London double decker bus without anyone having to stand. It is most instructive that that number has shrunk perceptively over the last ten years even as the number of the poorest half of the world has increased. The number released by Oxfam this year is twelve, only twelve, just enough to fit into a minibus or perhaps more instructively, into a Lagos danfo with space left over for the driver and conductor. The global population today is 8.3 billion people, up from 8.2 billion in 2025. This means that the twelve richest people in the world today, have resources in excess of the poorest 4.15 billion poorest people in the world. This figure simply boggles the mind! Forbes has identified around 3000 billionaires in the world today, certainly an impressive figure which dwarfs by a considered distance, the figure of 140 billionaires reported in 1987 when to all intents and purposes, the world was a saner place. Latest figures show that in the United States alone, there are 924 billionaires with a total worth of $6.9 trillion or 31.7% of global total. But there are other figures coming out of the US which must arrest our interest. 800 of the richest Americans are in control of no less than 3.8% of the nation’s wealth with the poorest 50% of the population having to make do with only 2.5%. Bearing in mind that the USA is by far the largest economy in the world, this figure verges on the scary. And with recent policies put in place by the Trump government, this disparity is set to grow as soon as tax cuts for the rich kick in as they are bound to do soon enough. The USA runs by far the largest economy in the world but a very significant number of her citizens are very poor, even when judged by third world standards. The Davos initiative has been alive since 1971 but in spite of it or is it because of it, global wealth inequalities have increased relentlessly year upon year. And it is clear that this trend will be accelerated in the coming years as the CEOs continue to hoover up more wealth at the expense of the rest of us.

The elephant in the room at Davos this year was a small man in a large suit and wearing a red tie. As the President of the United States, he was expected to make what should have been the keynote speech at the Forum. He made a speech alright but it was so full of air and blather that its emptiness will still embarrass his great grandchildren far into the next century. That speech has been said to mark the end of an old global order, that order that was supposed to bring order to the chaos of the global market place.

If the old order is said to be gone, then, it stands to reason that its place must be taken by a new one and indeed, it is safe to assume that there is a new world order as proclaimed by Mark Carney, the Prime Minister of Canada. He identified the main problem of the old order as being blatantly predatory. Those people or countries, the super powers that had somehow acquired a place at the table of global dominance feasted on those, the wretched of the earth, who were rigorously excluded from the table. They were not even given the dubious privilege of feeding on scraps as they were on the menu. Given that Canada is one of the wealthiest nations on earth, one would have thought that her place on that table was secure but the implication of Carney’s speech was that Canada did not have a place on that famous table and consequently was a victim of the old order. What he proposes is a new order to be governed by a concert of what he called middle powers which would include some countries in the European Union including France and Germany. Those of us on the outside looking in must be looking on with considerable bemusement because as far as we can see, some of those so-called middle powers had guaranteed places around the old table. Canada for one has been feeding on African flesh for centuries. Her first discernable industry was cod fishing off her North Atlantic coast. The best of their catch was sold in Europe for a very good price. The worst was salted and sold to the owners of sugar cane plantations in the West Indies. This formed the staple food of the slaves working on those plantations. Those slaves were of course excluded from the table and it is easy to see that they were the main course on the menu. Canada, France, Germany and other so-called middle powers of Carney’s imagination have been feasting on the rest of us for hundreds of years. And so, what is new about this much vaunted new order? Come next year, the number of those sitting in our pilot vehicle will fit comfortably in any self respecting SUV.

We return to the highway next week.

February 1, 2026
Highways are happy ways (II)

It is now more than a century since vehicles powered by the internal combustion engine were introduced to Nigeria. They are now found in every nook and cranny of the land stitching the country together even as they dictate the pace of the economy in every way conceivable. They do these and more in such a way that without them one cannot imagine any form of sustainable social intercourse going on within the country.

In all the time that they have been in operation here however, it is doubtful if Nigerians have really come to terms with the mechanics of this invention, perhaps the most characteristic invention of the twentieth century. The internal combustion engine is totally mechanical. At the heart of this contraption, you have a closed compartment within which a mixture of air and volatile fumes created by a jet of petrol are ignited by a spark leading to a combustible event which in turn leads to the release of a great deal of energy. This is then channelled to the wheels causing them to turn and the vehicle to move. Ordinarily, it is difficult to ascribe any spiritual dimension to this phenomenon but I am afraid that there is incontrovertible evidence that all those who earn their living working on any aspect of motor transportation in Nigeria are convinced that the internal combustion engine derives its demonstrably awesome power from a collection of powerful spiritual forces which will bestow their favour only after appropriate propitiation from those that use it. It is the implicit belief of transport workers of all hews that they are no more than agents of these spirits which as all spirits go are as capricious as the wind; useful but totally uncontrollable by the uninitiated. They strive to give the impression that in ministering to their machines, they are performing some rites which involve some form of communication with the spirits which rule the engine.

Given the inability of mere mortals to direct the affairs of unseen spirits, it is not surprising that the supervising god of this portion of human endeavour, at least in my neck of the woods, has been identified as Ogun, mighty in all his ascribed turbulence. Ogun is recognised as the patron of all those who work with metals, especially iron or steel from which all parts of any vehicle is crafted. It also befits his role as the maker of roads to be responsible for the welfare of those whose livelihood is wrung from their activity on any stretch of road. To venture forth on any road therefore, at least in the imagination of all those who work in and around vehicles, you need the favour of Ogun more than the fitness of your vehicle or the skill of your driver. It is however no longer fashionable to offer prayers directly to Ogun, although hard core transport workers are very active participants in Ogun festivals and regard themselves as devotees of the god. The same thing goes for all those who travel in motor vehicles because even as the lips of travelers are offering prayers to more modern deities, their heart is full of supplication to Ogun. At the base of such prayers is the wish that the traveler does not set out on a journey on any day that the road is hungry for a taste of human blood. The road in this case fits the description of Ogun’s much vaunted preference for blood over water. In this case, obedience to the will of the God is superior to all the efforts made to put the vehicle in which the journey is to be undertaken in serviceable condition. For a safe journey there are not many who would leave home without saying the appropriate prayers for traveling mercies. Given this background, it is not surprising that in the good old days of petrol scarcity, there were testimonies from some powerful pastors who announced to their enchanted congregation that with prayers to their personal God, they were able to drive their vehicle over vast distances without a drop of petrol in their tank thereby disobeying, with divine help it must be said, all the laws of physics and thermodynamics. The internal combustion engine has therefore been domesticated and incorporated into folk lore in a way that is peculiarly ours but hardly helpful to the cause of safety on our roads.

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For all the mystery attached to motor transport, it is easy to forget that the activities associated with it gives a form of livelihood to the largest group of Nigerians but for those involved in working on the farms. Drivers, mechanics, electricians, so called vulcanisers, panel beaters, painters, upholsters and the ubiquitous agbero all make it possible for our chaotic transport system to function after a fashion. Each person that works within the system belongs to a union which is led by officials who rule their chiefdoms with a heavy hand, maintaining their own brand of discipline through the use of gangs of young men with a predilection for violence of the extreme kind. And yet the guiding principle within these unions is democracy. Just like the country, they hold periodic elections with rival groups fighting it out, not in terms of winning votes but of inflicting more physical damage to people in other groups than it is inflicted on the winning group. These contests take place at local, state and federal governt levels with the winners at each level forming an alternative government to those at local government and other levels. Some of the state union chairmen are comrades in arms with their respective governors and go about their business in government issued official cars. This must be so because there are governors who owe their exalted positions to the patronage of the chairman of theit state motor transport union. This cannot be otherwise because all political parties have their shock troops who are recruited from the motor boys who love nothing more than raising hell and are always ready to go to war as long as their price is met. Their loyalty is never on the basis of ideology or some strongly held belief. It goes to whoever pays the highest price.

Right from the beginning, all those who chose to work in the transport system have been young men with attitude. They have always been drawn from the very bottom of the social pool. And yet, we have all this time given them the responsibility of driving all the vehicles which are supposed to take us safely from place to place. Ordinarily, not many of them are able to make enough money over a long period of time, to buy a vehicle of their own. And, for those of them that eventually manage to do so, it is almost invariably an investment to keep body and soul together in the form of a retirement benefit. Our roads have been surrendered to a large group of people whose only reason for being on the road at any time of day or night is to make as much money as possible within the shortest time possible. Given that premise, it is clear that safety considerations rank very low on the priority list of the majority of those who take to our highways each and every day. This being the case, most Nigerians have no choice but to set out on journeys on nothing more substantial than hope and a fervent prayer.

January 25, 2026
Highways are happy ways (I)

When the British arrived in what is now Nigeria in the closing years of the nineteenth century, they came with a clear mission; to extract from their colony, the raw materials with which to feed their industries and export them back home at minimum cost. In order to fulfil their mission, they immediately began to build the roads along which the raw materials they had extracted were to reach the ports for onward shipment to Britain. One of the first steps taken to consolidate their hold on the new colony was to straighten and widen as much as they could, the old footpaths which existed in all parts of their newly acquired territory. They were quite successful in this enterprise especially since it was complemented with the railways, the construction of which began at the same time as the roads. This made sense as it was the railways which at first did all the heavy lifting as the previous means of moving produce on the roads was by human porterage and the odd camel or donkey.

By 1926, the existing roads had become inadequate, especially because motorised vehicles had become available and needed asphalted roads on which to move efficiently. The colonial government therefore took the decision to build what they described as Trunk A roads throughout the colony. They might have been grandly described as Trunk roads but in reality they were narrow, winding and quite dangerous in parts but they did the job for which they were designed and evacuated produce from the points of production to railway stations and the ports for onward transmission to Britain. It is funny that these roads were in no way comparable to the magnificent roads with which the Romans criss-crossed their vast empire more than two millennia before, some which are still in use today. Some of these roads were built in Britain but our colonial masters did not seem to have seen the remnants of the old Roman roads as a template for the roads which they were building in their own colonies. It has to be said for all it is worth however that the Trunk A roads were carefully maintained by the Public Works Department (PWD) which kept them free of potholes. For this purpose, the PWD had work camps all along the Trunk A roads as these roads acquired a life of their own, as with their use, a sort of culture developed along the roads and was sustained by the people who had seen the utility value of the roads as they were being built. For example, the roads were quite long and journeys along them could stretch over a couple of days and more. On the Western Trunk A road which passed through developed urban centres, it stretched from Asaba all the way to Lagos and passed through relatively big and long established towns all along the way. Benin, Owo, Akure, Ilesa, Ife, Ibadan, Sagamu, Ikorodu before reaching Lagos. A culture which was associated with the road, grew in all those towns and made them memorable to all those who at one time or the other, travelled along it. As far as I know, the importance of that road to Ilesa, where I now live, is shown by the observation that its commercial importance was drastically reduced when Lagos bound traffic was diverted to the Benin – Ore road shortly after independence. The Trunk A roads of those days were tarred but virtually all other roads were left to the mercies of rain, wind and sunshine. The vehicles which plied those roads together with their passengers were invariably covered in a fine but tenacious coat of dust such that your journey was not truly over until they had taken a bath to wash off the effects of their journey. The use of some of those designated Trunk B and C roads were actually quite seasonal and they were hardly kept in a state of repair. Even today, those early colonial roads still exist but are now recognised as Federal roads (Trunk A), State roads (Trunk B) and Local government roads (Trunk C).

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Although the new roads were primarily designed to move agricultural produce, the period of the building of those Trunk A and others led to the development of passenger transport which may, or may not have been factored into the plans which led to the building of those roads in the first place. After all, passenger transport did not contribute to the movement of cocoa or palm oil to the ports. It was soon clear however that there was the need for passenger traffic if the usefulness of the road was to be sustained. This aspect of road development was left to local entrepreneurs who began to build fleets of lorries which moved both freight and passengers, some of them over vast distances. Although those lorries were no more sophisticated than motorised wooden boxes, each of them represented a very substantial investment and enormous prestige for the owners. Nothing represented wealth more glaringly than a lorry which carried the name of the owner or owners as the case may be over vast distances or even within a defined locality. Furthermore, it was also not practicable to put a solitary vehicle on the road as any need of any but the most trivial repair could take the lorry out of commission for long periods of time. Consequently, any transporter worth his salt needed to maintain a fleet of vehicles. This dictated the formation of partnerships of varied longevity because it was soon discovered that joint ownership of vehicles was a tricky business indeed. The giant of motor transport in those days was Armels Transport, not surprisingly, a company whose origin is shrouded in mystery but which at a certain point in time dominated the Nigerian transport sector to the virtual exclusion of any other transport company. Many companies dealing with the transport of

goods and passengers all over Nigeria have emerged since then but no other transport company has stirred the imagination quite like the Armels Transport of my early years. The company operated on a schedule which was adhered to come rain or shine and you could send anything to anywhere through Armels. There are still a few toothless oldies around who remember as children, being sent safely and punctually to far destinations through Armels. The company which had its origin in Benin City was involved in the transport of goods and passengers. It was so trusted that it was a dedicated mail carrier on contract to the colonial government. It also carried passengers in perceptibly greater comfort and safety than her competitors and was consequently heavily patronised by the emerging middle class. The company was bought over by the Midwest government in 1971 and has since been swallowed up in the morass of the Nigerian business environment.

Another example of a transporter of that era was Ojukwu Transport, an enterprise which was begun with one second hand lorry in 1930 but had grown to a fleet in excess of two hundred only twenty years later. The company concentrated on ferrying goods, mainly on government contract, from the East to Lagos. Although it was founded in Nnewi, its headquarters was and indeed is still in Lagos even though you are never likely to see a vehicle with Ojukwu Transport stenciled on its side. The company appears to have been swallowed by history and there are not many people who have memories of travelling by Ojukwu Transport as it was mainly involved in carrying goods on behalf of the colonial government. Her heydays were the war years when it provided lucrative transport services to the British Army, a service for which its proprietor was not only handsomely paid but was also decorated with a knighthood by the grateful owners of the now defunct British Empire. The days of hauling raw materials from the East to the ports are now firmly in the past as the country has transformed from a producer of agricultural raw materials to the collection of rent from our troubled oil fields. All in all, it appears that nothing lasts forever!

January 18, 2026
The quiet American

When the thought of writing this piece popped into my head, the title that popped into my head with it was The ugly American because I was going to anchor it on Graham Greene’s iconic novel. It was only when I tried to find some information with which to refresh my memory about the book that I found that I had, at least in my mind conflated the title with another book which incidentally, I have never read but which I have always believed was an apt description of the American depicted in that ageless Graham Greene classic, The quiet American. In deference to Graham Greene, I changed the title of my article to The Quiet American even if the adjective that first popped into my mind was the one on the title page of the other book.

In December of 1982, I was passing through Heathrow airport and as was my habit at the time, I popped into WH Smith, the dedicated bookseller to travelers in train stations and airports throughout the length and breadth of Britain. I went in to browse through the books on display and found that for some reason which I no longer remember the bookshop was celebrating the extremely rare, if not singular genius of Graham Greene. The sight of all his books on display flew to my head like potent liquor. Goaded by this sight, I rushed around the display in the manner of a country yokel come to town, picking up books as if I could not believe the evidence of my eyes and feared that the books were liable to go up in smoke right before my eyes. Such was my admiration for Greene that in the end I took a selection of six books to the cashier whose eyebrows shot up in a surge of emotion when she found that all the six books I had put before her, had been written by, as far as I was concerned, the incomparable Graham Greene.

In those heady days when paperbacks cost less than a couple of quid and we had not yet been crushed by the yoke of foreign exchange, I paid up with the flourish of a man with a lot of money in his purse and left the shop with a spring in my step. I then went on to find a convenient spot from whereI immediately started to read one of the books I had just purchased. With my head in one of my recently purchased books, I waited almost unconcernedly for my flight to be called. It must be clear to my reader by now that Greene is one of my all time favourite authors. As a well brought up Anglican in those days, my response to Greene’s obviously Roman Catholic themes was one of considerable bewilderment but I soon overcame this feeling when I came to realise that religion came with such a personal feeling that it could be regarded as binding only to those who are moved to express an opinion on any subject connected with it. The rest of us are free to interpret any message to fit our own belief or lack of it. I thus came to a liberating conclusion which allowed me to communicate effectively with Greene and even be one with him on many occasions.

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The American depicted as the quiet American in Greene’ s book was far uglier than quiet but at the same time quite quintessentially American. He was quiet alright, after all, he was a spy. But beyond that, he was earnest, idealistic, well intentioned but naive to the point of stupidity thereby giving proof of his genuine American identity.

For well over a century, the USA has been a land of opportunity for people from all over the globe. Her educational institutions have attracted the brightest talents from all over the world and her scientists have crossed frontiers of knowledge in many different directions. They have conquered space and landed several men on the moon for good measure and even now they are talking realistically of the possibility of colonizing Mars in the near future. American technology drives the world in many areas and their search engines keep us in touch with all forms of knowledge in every aspect of human endeavour.

Away from knowledge, the Americans keep all the world entertained with their music, films of all genrés and modern dance. In various sporting arenas, American performers keep the rest of the world thrilled with their superlative performances just as their writers have weaved veritable magic in their offerings to the muses. In other words, the Americans are collectively the salt of the earth. That is, however, as long as they keep their mouths shut and are quiet. Just get any everyday run of the mill American to open their mouth however and you will be bowled over by the filth which proceeds therefrom.

Almost immediately, you will be gratuitously informed that Americans are the freest people on earth. Not only that, their President is the leader of the free world whatever that means. Just as you are trying to process this because you know the USA has the highest number of people incarcerated per capita in the world, you will be told that every American has the constitutional right of free speech through the First Amendment whilst the Second Amendment gives every full blooded American the right to bear arms and to use them as they seem fit. You immediately see why somewhere everyday that the country is blessed with, at least one person goes off his head and shoots at least a few people quite randomly. You think for all their vaunted intelligence they would put some check on gun ownership in place but no, gun makers, sellers and users spend millions of dollars to ensure that legislation to control the ownership of guns never gets passed.

Everything considered, the US is an ocean liner floating on a sea of paradoxes. On top of the American pile are a few thousand billionaires. In case you are wondering, those are people who have at least a thousand million dollars to their name and they are still busily engaged in all kinds of deals, a healthy proportion on the shady side, to make even more money. In the meantime there are millions of Americans who have nowhere to lay their head in the depth of winter and are constantly wondering where their next meal is coming from or when.

There are many interesting stats associated with the USA right about now but none of them is more important than the 40 trillion dollars which that country owes to the rest of the world. This means that the leader of the free world is by far the largest debtor nation in the world and it is clear that she lacks the capacity to pay back any of it soon, if ever. Instead of even thinking about paying her creditors the US government under Trump is holding the rest of the world to ransom using the over-equipped American armed forces as a weapon of mass of extraction of resources from other parts of the world. If the quiet American epitomises the the good American, that garrulous fellow in the White House can only be described as the ugly American as described by Graham Greene.

The series on highways continues next week.

January 11, 2026
Highways are happy way

I have on several occasions in the last few years decided to write an article or even a series of articles about driving on Nigerian roads. Until now however, my resolve has faltered on each occasion for one reason or the other. This is probably because the only reason why I have always wanted to write about this subject is to encourage safer driving habits on our roads. After careful consideration I have come to realise the futility of doing that and this has become a stumbling block to putting my thoughts on this subject down on paper. And yet the urge to write has never really left me which is why I suppose I am writing these lines at this time.

The futility of making any attempt to change this situation for the better should be fairly obvious to anyone who has taken a short trip along any road anywhere in this country. The fatalism attending any such journey is palpable. Just think of the number of times that gatherings do not break up until someone gets up to beseech God for what is described as travelling mercies for all those present and who need to travel back to their respective homes. To be frank, I have always wondered how this phrase was coined because its meaning cannot be immediately obvious to anyone who learnt to speak English anywhere outside Nigeria. The sentiment behind it is however immediately understood in any gathering. The point is that your arrival at your chosen destination is dependent on you finding favour with a rather capricious deity who bestowed favours to travellers or could withdraw them as he very well pleased. Go to any so-called garage or motor park and you are bound to find blackmailers in the form of beggars; men and women who prey on the fears of intending travellers who are never sure of their standing with the travel deity and are willing to part with some money to enhance their chances of surviving the journey before them. The reason why money is parted with at this time is so that the deity could be appropriately approached on their behalf by professional supplicants who know how to make their case to the deity effectively.

The sad truth is that in spite of the large volume of prayers offered up for what is described as a safe journey, a distressingly large number of vehicular accidents happen on our roads on a daily basis. Motorcycle accidents happen so often that they are no longer thought of as being worthy of any report in any medium.I am sure of this because although I am seldom on the road these days, I have witnessed several motorcycle accidents in the last few months alone. This is by no means a deterrent to the millions of Nigerians who daily blithely take their lives in their hands by climbing behind okada riders and undertake journeys long and short, at considerable risk to their continued earthly existence. All people riding on a motorcycle are required to wear a helmet but that law is more respected in the breach than in its observance. And, whatever danger that they were courting by riding on an okada is more than doubled by the refusal to wear a helmet. To complicate matters a little bit more, there are occasions when as many as four riders are squeezed together on one bike. The danger from such an arrangement is monumental to say the least but who cares? a crumpled note slipped into the hand of some policeman at a conveniently situated checkpoint solves any problems caused by this egregious breach of a law of the land. And there is no limit to what can be carried on an okada. To make this point without any ambiguity, I once saw a corpse being transported on a motorcycle. The give away here was when the dead weight of the corpse

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caused the motorcycle to become overbalanced, leaving both the living and the dead sprawled out on the cold tarmac. I am sure that every reader can provide their own personal example of this phenomenon.

Motorcycle accidents have become so common that they are self reported anywhere even though orthopaedic wards all over the land as well as makeshift facilities manned by self styled bone setters are virtually overflowing with victims of motorcycle accidents.

The number of casualties associated with motorcycle accidents are seldom impressive. Not so with a single form of mass transit; cars, SUVs, minibuses, so-called luxurious buses and even open trucks, more suited to transporting livestock. These are frequently stocked full of fee paying passengers and driven many miles at great speed cross country. As soon as you step into any of these vehicles or if you prefer, contraptions, you can consider that you have surrendered your life to blind fate. You will pick up the responsibility for your life at the end of your journey wherever that is. Unfortunately, many of such journeys are terminated abruptly, many of them far from the desired destination and for many of the people involved, they become grim items of statistics. The gory ends of such journeys are reported on the pages of newspapers or as brief reports on radio and television. To fit the tenor of today, videos shot at the scene are sent round the world on social media. The number of casualties of such accidents, which are almost inevitably described as ghastly by reporters, vary from one of two to several dozen. Never mind the number as it is soon forgotten. The injured are invariably reported as having been conveyed to the nearest hospital and the dead are always deposited, according to reports, in the mortuary. End of story.

There are of course many reasons for the recurrent carnage on our roads. And the reasons keep growing. For example, motorists now have to contend with the insecurity challenges on our roads. The fear of kidnappers, bandits and the occasional plane armed robber must now be regarded by the understandably wary traveller as the beginning of wisdom. This is because fatalities which occur in the course of these operations are frequently reported. Gone, perhaps forever are night travels. Older readers may remember that until recently, night buses had converted our roads to busy traffic arteries in the dead of night. Now, there is a rush to get off the roads at dusk in order not to become an insecurity statistic. An unsung but quite lucrative casualties of the current state are outposts, many of them out in the bush, offering catering services to drivers and their passengers throughout the night. Without the traffic generated by night travellers, these establishments, many of them that were quite famous, have had to be closed down. Unfortunately, the various agents of insecurity at work all over the country, are showing that they can do away with the cover of darkness and have turned virtually every trip on any road in Nigeria into something of a lottery. This has added another point to the prayer for journeying mercies.

January 4, 2026
Language activism V

Now that this series on language is coming to an end, it is only appropriate for me to give some background information about the subject that I have been discussing.

This series is an extended typecast of the keynote address I delivered at a colloquium in honour of Niyi Osundare (he needs no introduction) at the Ekiti State University in Ado Ekiti on the occasion of the poet’s seventy-eighth birthday. It was a grand occasion made even grander by the presence of the celebrant, his natural exuberance not diminished an iota by advancing age. As usual in the crowd that turned up on the day, there were a large number of those who had encountered Osundare in classrooms and on the pages of books and newspapers over a long period of time. They had all come to celebrate a life of achievement. This was a celebration of a life in drama and literature and a great time was had by all. In the background however, the seriousness of the occasion was appreciated by all as it was also an interrogation of language; that score that is shared by all humankind even if there is a multiplicity of languages which in any case, is an indication of human diversity. And really, that is a cause for celebration as it is a sign of human adaptability to the various environments which have been colonised by human beings most of whom spread out of Africa about 50,000 years ago.

There is no gain saying the fact that Osundare is an accomplished writer in the English language, a language which has, over the years, become wired to his very bones. And yet, I can confidently wager that he did not speak a word of English until he was eight, if not ten years old. He belongs to a generation which was made literate through the medium of local languages. I know because I belong to that generation myself. Looking back, I think we all derived great benefit from that system, a system which acknowledged our cultural and linguistic roots and hardly exposed us to the language of the oppressor in our infancy. Interestingly, this policy was designed by the oppressor, perhaps because we were considered not worthy of introduction to the master’s language until we had proved our mettle. But really, that is unlikely. Yoruba in our case was used as an introduction to learning and it worked admirably, not least in the case of Niyi Osundare whose command of the English language is in the class of legend. It comes to him without effort in the manner of Athena who sprang into the world fully grown from the head of Zeus, her divine father. He has been a writer in English for close to sixty years, so long and so well that his works have outgrown that language and have been translated into more than a dozen languages all around the world. This means that his genius has not been restricted to the more than one billion speakers of English but extended to other billions going through life without the benefit of the English language in their baggage.

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There has been a great deal of debate about the desirability of African writers writing in English or French. Ngugi wa Thiongo stands out as a prominent African writer who turned his back on the use of English and took to writing in his mother tongue, the language spoken by the Kikuyu people of Kenya. They were one of the few African people who rose up in rebellion against British rule and paid for their independence with impressive amounts of blood, sweat and tears. It can be said that under their circumstances their language deserves to be admitted to the table of global languages. Ngugi was only making that claim on behalf of his people. Most of us are content to write in English in an attempt to reach the rest of the world but ironically, Ngugi was not denied that privilege because the world had been introduced to him through translation in the same way that Osundare has been able to speak to the world through through the medium of translation into many other languages.

Osundare speaks to the world through the use of the English language. Under the dense foliage of that language, his message is rooted to the soil of his native Ekiti dialect from which it has extracted a peculiar richness which has complimented the richness of his English. Without those nutrients, the flavour of Osundare’s tremendous contribution to the English language could have been in some dispute. And, this cannot be restricted to Osundare because we see the same adaptation of other Nigerian languages in the writing of practically all Nigerian writers including Achebe and Soyinka. Gabriel Okara, perhaps the oldest of that lot, has left a body of work dripping with his native Ijaw. It should not be forgotten that the English language lends itself to such interpretation or, if you like, misinterpretation because of her natural flexibility. The English language must not be allowed to set any boundaries of our own use as this would only be a restriction of our freedom to contribute our own quota to that language, to its detriment. Amos Tutuola is an example of this. An extreme example but an example all the same. There is no limit to the number of people who, like Shakespeare can bend the English language to their will.

It must be pointed out however that there are not many people with the facility to do this. Osundare and a few other Nigerians have amply demonstrated their ability to manipulate the English language as the fancy directs them and that is just a fact. With the availability of excellent translation facilities, does it really matter in which language literature is produced? I have been able to enjoy a large number of authors in translation without any feeling of being deprived and so have many other people. This is why I am intrigued that there is hardly any translated literature available in Yoruba or any other Nigerian language for that matter. Osundare writes in English but his work has been translated into practically all the major languages of the world. Very little of it has so far been rendered in Yoruba. I am certain that Osundare’s poems would be as resonant in Yoruba as they are in English and they could even be better mined for context, after all, most of them are set locally. We just don’t know and can’t know. This problem is put in proper perspective for me when the only major book in world literature that has been translated into Yoruba is the Bible. Food for the soul, not so much for the intellect. None of the many science books that our students read or pretend to read, has been found worthy of translation into Yoruba. None of them have of course been written in Yoruba. This can only be as a result of our collective lack of confidence in our post-colonial status as second class global citizens. It has nothing to do with the sophistication or the lack of it of the language.

We are no longer colonial subjects but we are still waiting for our liberation. This can only be the reason the Federal Minister of Education can, at a forum organised by the British Council of all such bodies, announce the ban of all local languages from the Nigerian educational system. Henceforth, the only language worthy of being heard in any Nigerian school is English. Never mind the lame excuse he gave for this language policy. It is simply shameful that a system that produced the likes of Niyi Osundare is now receiving official and public condemnation for the almost systematic destruction of the entire Nigerian educational system. The Minister is advised to take an educated look at the system over which he is expected to preside.

December 28, 2025
Language Activism IV

English is the most dominant language in the world today but, it has to be said that it does not owe that dominance to any innate superiority over other languages. On the contrary, it owes that dominance both to an accident of history and the rise to prominence of the United States of America where English is the official language. Another factor in this saga is the extreme adaptability of the language as it can bend and sway in the wind with the best of them. It is also of course the current language of science even if Arabic, Greek, Latin and even German were more prominent in this regard in previous epochs. Right until the end of WWI, virtually all the best scientists spoke to each other in German for the simple reason that a great many of them were of German origin and the most authoritative scientific journals were published in that language. The equilibrium in this matter swung to English because, first, Germany lost that war and became impoverished. And then, the rise of Nazism in that country caused the best scientists, many of them of Jewish extraction, to flee the country, to the USA where they supplied both brawn and brain to the flowering of science, first in that country and then, the rest of the world. It has to be said however that the adaptability of the language lent itself to its global spread and was prepared to lend itself to this phenomenon even if it did not lend itself to providing scientific words. Given this background, I insist that any language, given the right push, Yoruba,or any other local language for that matter may be adopted as a language of science. I have made this remark because, the collective loss of confidence which has afflicted us and all other African languages will not or never allow us to lay any claim to this accolade. But, it exists even if the will is absent.

Going back a few centuries, it is clear that greatness was thrust on the English language. After all, it was a language not spoken in the power centers even in England. Their foreign overlords, the Norman, imposed their borrowed French on all aspects of the realm even as English remained the language of the common man in the streets whilst the rich and powerful in their castles and other points of authority conversed and governed in French. For example, it was not until the years towards the end of the fourteenth century that English was allowed into the legal system that governed the country. After all, the vast majority of those being tried in the courts were English and had no knowledge of French. To expedite matters brought before the courts, the English language was admitted into those courts, to stand side by side with French. By the early seventeenth century, English had advanced so long on the road to sophistication that it had become dominant in the land of its birth. It is also instructive to note that the constant wars against the French over a long period during which the English won some famous battles and controlled swaths of territory in France enhanced the growth of English. But, that is a long story and is not really relevant to this discussion.

With the crystal clear quality of hindsight, it is easy to conclude that without Shakespeare and King John VI, of Scotland and II of England, the place of English at the high table of languages could not have been secured. Cometh the hour, cometh the man. The man of the hour in the case of English language is William Shakespeare, often referred to as the immortal bard. His prodigious output of plays and sonnets speak for him in this regard. More than four hundred years after his demise, it can be said that there is no day that goes by without the performance of a Shakespearian play going on somewhere around the globe. That speaks for the sheer volume of his output but even more than that, it shows the freshness of the subjects of his plays which have been classified as historical, comical and historical, all of them based as they are on the universal human condition. More than this however are the words and phrases which were coined by Shakespeare and incorporated into the English language which in the time of Shakespeare was being transformed into Modern English which is more or less what is spoken all round the world today. Shakespeare was writing at a time when Modern English was emerging from Middle English but more than that, he personally coined and injected, some say, up to three thousand words and phrases into the English language. So many that not a day goes by without a regular English speaker anywhere in the world not using at least one of them. He, more than any Englishman, living or dead, has dragged the English language into the public square.

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The other man who has been associated with the rise of the English language is King James VI of Scotland and I of England. He did not add a single word to the language but it was he that ordered what has now been described as the authoritative translation of the Bible into Modern English thus enhancing the spread of the language not only within England but later within English colonies abroad. There was hardly any family in the realm which did not have a King James version of the Bible and for most people the Bible provided their first contact with the written word. It was therefore the means through which literacy gained some traction within the common people. The translation appeared at a time when the Church of England was being established and laid the ground for the traditions on which the Church has come to be associated with but the influence of this version of the Bible went far beyond the confines of the Church. It was immeasurably helpful in establishing the dominance of the English language. When we think of the activities of the missionaries who introduced Christianity to many parts of the world, it was the King James version (KJV) of the Bible that they took with them on their journeys.

The Bible eventually reached the shores of Nigeria in the shape of the KJV but it was not placed in the hands of the locals. In any case since they were illiterate, doing so would have been a monumental waste of time. By 1884 however the KJV had been translated into Yoruba, primarily through the effort of Samuel Ajayi Crowther, a returned Saro who had started the piecemeal translation of the Bible some thirty years before. The language of this translation can be described as Oyo-Egba, the dialect of Yoruba spoken by Ajayi Crowther, the first black Anglican Bishop. Prior to this period and even since then, the Yoruba language has existed in an impressive number of dialects. As soon as Crowther’s translation became available however, it became the arbiter of the Yoruba language throughout the length and breadth of Yorubaland, first among the educated and then throughout the rest of the population. This language as well as the various dialects of Yoruba are now under attack by the English language even though the English have nothing to do with what is going on. It is the native speakers who are refusing to pass on the patrimony of language to their children, forgetting that when children are not introduced to a deity, that deity soon withers and dies. However, it has to be said in the midst of this neglect, a sizable number of young people are searching assiduously for the deity of their language and finding it in all sorts of unexpected places including social media. They carry the heavy burden of expectations and are the ones that are primarily responsible for making sure that the lights will not go down on a proud language tradition, one which has been painstakingly put together by countless generations over thousands of years.

December 21, 2025
Language activism (III)

The greatest threat to language diversity in the world is the English language as it spreads across the globe in the manner of a plague. Close to a quarter of the world already speaks the language and many more are learning it. Even then, there are probably more Chinese speakers than English speakers but Chinese speakers are restricted to one country and their language does not carry the threat of global domination which is associated with the English language.

The situation with the English language has created a debate within communities, especially in Africa in which the language was established through colonialisation. The acquisition of the language in those countries was at the expense of local languages which were reduced to the status of vernaculars labouring under a massive inferiority complex. English was after all, the language of conquerors who had demonstrated what at the turn of the twentieth century were regarded as signs of superiority to the colonised peoples. If the British had been able to seize all the power within their colonies, it stood to reason that their language was superior to the local languages. This conclusion appeared to be reasonable at the time and as the Yoruba have taken to saying, the world has become the property of the oyinbo people to do with it whatever was their wish. As it happened, the British did not need to belabour this point as the colonised people themselves saw this as a matter of course and regarded the acquisition of English as a desirable exercise. After all, they had been pushed into a position of weakness if not abject subservience. It is interesting to note that unlike the French, the British, at the beginning of their colonisation exercise, did not attempt to force their language on the colonised. This was radically different with the French. You will find that more than fifty years after the end of colonisation, French is still spoken in former French colonies as the language is spoken in France. This is because language transfer was part of the assimilation process which the French imposed on their colonial subjects. The nonchalant attitude of the British has given rise to a situation in which there are Nigerian Englishes, that is, English spoken with various local flavours. It appears that we have been able to domesticate the English language and clothed it in locally fabricated robes. The history of the English language lends itself to this treatment. The propagation of French in the French colonies was both methodical and rigidly controlled so that there was very little danger of the development of African varieties of French. The difference between the two colonial powers was historical.

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The original inhabitants of Britain spoke various Gaelic and Celtic languages, at least until Anglo-Saxon tribes arrived from parts of present-day Germany. They brought with them their Germanic language, a version of the language which, because of its simplicity, was regarded as low Dutch. It was controlled with only rudiments of a grammatical structure and looking back now, it is clear that this grew in time to be the major strength of the language as it aided its spread within the British isles. This being the case, it pushed the earlier indigenous languages into the fringes of what is now Wales, parts of Scotland and across the Irish sea into Ireland.

The new Brits or English had hardly settled down in their new island home when they started receiving unwelcome visits from their Scandinavian cousins from across the North sea. Better known in history as Vikings, they were sea faring brigands who swept in from time to time to pillage seaside towns from which they were also not averse to kidnapping the odd young maiden after killing the men of course. So great was their menace that the locals also thought it wise to pay some indemnity to their tormentors so as to be left in peace or, at least some semblance of peace. Known as danegeld, this payment bought peace for certain parts of England until the Danish king decided to incorporate the ransom paying parts into his kingdom. This shows the wisdom of not negotiating with terrorists! In the meantime, many words of Scandinavian origin were incorporated into the expanding English lexicon.

At the time that the Danish king was casting his awful shadow on parts of England, other Vikings were menacing Ireland and parts of France. Thoroughly intimidated and beaten down, the Vikings who were called Normans in France were given a large portion of land adjacent to the English Channel. They therefore became the owners of Normandy and settled down as rulers of the place and began to cast covetous eyes across the English Channel. After all, the place was part of the Danish empire at one time, they saw conquering and incorporating it into Normandy could only be considered logical. It fell to William the conqueror, also known as William the bastard to fulfil this enterprise. On October 12th 1066, William crossed the English Channel accompanied by an army under the command of 21 noblemen and by evening of that day had destroyed the English army under King Harold and became the ruler of all England. He distributed the kingdom to his generals whose descendants still own the lands gifted to their forebears in 1066.

The Normans settled in Normandy and rather than continue to speak their own Scandinavian language, they switched over to French, the language of their reluctant hosts. The Normans brought the French language with them and for more than three centuries made it the language of the English court. It was not until those three hundred years had passed that English was promoted to be used in official documents. By the sixteenth century however, English had become the only official language of the realm.

As with all the other conquerors who had darkened the shores of Britain before them, the Normans came over with their own version of their adopted French language. And, as with all the languages that came before, the English refused to adopt the language of the conquerors. What they did was to incorporate the French language into English. They did it so well that up to 40% of English as it is spoken today is either French or French derived. This has enriched English to such an extent that if those French words did not exist within it, it would not be English. For example, a live cow is cow in English, meat from the dead animal is called beef in modern English and it is French derived. In the case of deer, the borrowed word is venison. There are thousands of other examples which give a roundness to the English language, a roundness which you are not likely to find in other languages from other parts of the world. There are also almost as many Latin words in English as are French. So, what you have is a Germanic language that is almost as Romance in character as it is Germanic. There is no language that is half as promiscuous as the English language. It went to North America and came away with a multitude of words including tomato, chilli, tobacco, lacrosse, tomahawk and very many more. From the other side of the world in India, the English picked up a slew of words such as verandah, bungalow, thug, loot, calico and many more.

When I suggested that we should be able to teach science subjects in Yoruba to a friend he just could not wrap it around his head. How would you say Chemistry or Biology in Yoruba? What he did not know is that Chemistry is an Arabic word, so is Algebra. We talk of algorithms these days but how many of us know that it is of Arabic extraction. Many of the words we encounter in science are also derived from Greek and Latin. Consult a modern English dictionary and you will find that japa, okada and other Nigerian origin words have been admitted into the English language. Strip English of all those stolen and borrowed words and just what do you have left?

December 14, 2025
Language activism (II)

Long after Charles Darwin completed his ground breaking work on the theory of the evolution of species, he kept it under wraps and for good reason. He clearly recognised the explosive nature of that theory and being a rather mild mannered and religious man, he was reluctant to cause a cataclysmic detonation and so, he sat on it. Later on however, he got the inspiration to publish his work because Alfred Wallace working on the other side of the world from Darwin had come to the same conclusion as he had and there was no longer any excuse to maintain radio silence on his seminal work. He went ahead and published his work and created a new intellectual world. The reverberations from that publication are still shaking the world of science with some people standing staunchly with Darwin and others no less implacably opposed to him. It is therefore expedient to point out at this stage that this article is really not about the theory of evolution. It is, however, a convenient starting point for this article about the aspect of language activism that I have been writing about.

Most people have only a vague knowledge about the theory of evolution but virtually everyone with more than a modicum of education will confidently tell you about the law of the survival of the fittest. This has been used to explain why some people have power, influence and extravagant wealth. They are supposed to hold that position because they have been found out to be the fittest of their kind and deserve to corner all the riches of the world. This thinking has also been used to justify racism and white supremacy. That may indeed be so but nobody has been able to provide any clinching argument to support this. Nobody has been able to do this for the simple reason that Darwin’s work does not lend any support to this contention. Nature in all its vastness does not care about fitness. What it cares about is adaptability. Nature is dynamic and is frequently undergoing fundamental changes and so fitness at any point in time may become a dire liability at the next moment. This is why, it is those that can be adapted to change that will survive and go on to proliferate within any given set of conditions. Mankind in total, has been able to demonstrate great adaptability which is why we have been able to colonise the globe in its entirety. As it is with our species, so it is with the languages we speak. Those languages which can be adapted to changing situations will survive and by the iron laws of nature those that are found wanting in this particular regard, will become extinct in the manner of any plant or animal that is caught in the web of changing environments. No new languages are being formed anywhere in the world at this time and it is clear that the number of languages spoken in the world will be reduced at an increasing rate leading to a corresponding decrease in language diversity thereby going across the grain of evolution. This is because our collective future can only be guaranteed by increasing diversity. To put things in proper perspective, the less diversity we have, the greater the possibility of a massive clear out of a species leading to extinction and that goes against the grain of nature. We encounter this not only in terms of language but also in terms of the foods we eat and the cultures that govern our existence. We must therefore be conservationists in respect of our respective languages. One of the ways that this can be achieved is through multilingualism. The ideal situation is that we should all speak at least three or four different languages, especially since as children, we can effortlessly pick up any number of languages, the only limit being that we would be able to speak only those languages spoken to us in infancy. Whilst it is true that this is desirable from a social point of view, it is also desirable from a purely personal point of view. Ongoing studies suggest that the ability to speak several different languages not only improves individual confidence but also has the capacity to protect the brain from dementia and other such conditions as old age sets in. For the overwhelming majority of educated Nigerians, this is good news as they have at least two languages in their locker. As things stand, they at least speak their local language as well as English.

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Our ability to speak English is a fall out of our colonial past. In the nineteenth century as Europeans began their incursion into Africa, it was soon clear that the ability to speak the language of those interlopers was the source of a distinct advantage to those who could speak the newly grafted language. It made it possible for such people to be pulled into the orbit of the colonizers and in doing so becoming intermediaries between the colonizers and the indigenous peoples. At that time, the colonies were sorely dependent on commercial activities. They all provided a source of income and those intermediaries were able to create a profitable niche for themselves sometimes to the detriment of those on the other side of the language barrier. The situation has hardly changed since then and there are no signs of any impending change. On the other hand, many of those who have since gone through the educational system are determined to confer some advantage on their children by restricting them to the mastering of the English language in order for them to land elite jobs and propagate the method of recruitment into the upper classes.

English is the official language of Nigeria as well as more than eighty countries in the world. This is because there was a time when more than a quarter of the world was under British colonial rule. That was a time when it was said that the sun never set on the British empire. Now that the sun has finally set on that empire in every sense of the world, the British have left their language as an unforgettable souvenir in all those countries and more because Rwanda and Burundi which were never colonised by the British have adopted English as their official language. In addition to all those countries which were once British colonies, the United States of America is an English speaking territory but even then it is worth remembering that the original states of the union were English colonies and as they expanded to cover fifty states, the English language also spread to cover all the states and so, of the two billion English speakers all over the world, close to 350 million of them are Americans and it may even be said that the continued influence of the English language is due to the cultural domination of the global space by American institutions. The world is kept entertained and acculturated by films made in Hollywood. The language of American technology which stands increasingly dominant is English and this technology is exploited the world over. We are all in the grip of social media and without a working knowledge of the English language, one is quickly left out of the loop and so, all over the world, people have English as their second language. For a lot of us therefore, having English as a second language as we do expedites the japa syndrome which gives us the valuable option of packing up and going away to another country. One is actually spoilt for choice as to where to relocate to. The one downside is that the situation we are in has become a threat to our local languages and the danger to language diversity all over the world looms increasingly large on the global horizon.

December 7, 2025