The hall was packed full but the unease was fuller. As scholars gathered at Ladoke Akintola University of Technology (LAUTECH) in Ogbomoso, a familiar language debate returned with renewed urgency. The federal government’s English-only education policy may simplify classrooms—but at a cost Nigeria can scarcely afford. Experts warn it threatens to erode the country’s linguistic heritage and weaken its cultural identity, reports Associate Editor ADEKUNLE YUSUF.
The hall at Ladoke Akintola University of Technology (LAUTECH), Ogbomoso, carried a peculiar stillness that Thursday—one not born of formality, but of expectation. The air felt weighted, as though the walls themselves sensed that what was about to unfold would reach beyond academic ritual. Scholars filled the seats in quiet clusters; students leaned forward, alert. Outside, Ogbomoso moved at its familiar pace. Inside the hall, however, time seemed to slow, preparing the ground for a reckoning.
When Prof Taiwo Oloruntoba-Oju rose to speak, he did not begin with spectacle. He began with gravity. And as the 7th Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Lecture progressed, it became clear that this was not simply an address on language policy. It was an intervention—urgent, unsettling and deeply consequential—into Nigeria’s understanding of itself. The lecture, titled “Are Nigerians Bilingual, Multilingual or Semilingual? The Theatricalisation of Linguistic Precarity and a Postcolonial Cacophony,” explored the historical, political and cultural forces that have contributed to the progressive erosion of indigenous languages in Nigeria. Oloruntoba-Oju traced the decline to colonial antecedents, inconsistent government policies, and the influence of popular culture, including theatre, music and media.
At the centre of his warning was the Federal Government’s recent decision to mandate English as the sole medium of instruction at all levels of education, including pre-school and early primary years. To Oloruntoba-Oju, a renowned professor of applied language and literature, the policy was not just misguided; it was dangerous. It represented, he argued, a profound rupture with decades of research, advocacy and lived experience on how children learn, how societies reproduce themselves, and how nations preserve their identities. “This,” he said with deliberate restraint, “is a stunning reversal” of decades of research, advocacy and policy on the importance of mother tongue education. “Mother tongue education is foundational in nurturing a child’s cognitive abilities. It builds confidence and serves as a child’s primary linguistic identity. Replacing it entirely with English risks recolonising the minds of citizens and undermining our national identity.”
A policy that defies knowledge
For over half a century, global scholarship in linguistics, education, psychology and cognitive science has converged on a clear principle: children learn best when first educated in their mother tongue. Far from impeding intellectual growth, early instruction in a child’s first language strengthens cognitive development, enhances comprehension, and provides a stable foundation for acquiring additional languages later. Yet Nigeria’s new English-only directive proceeds as if this body of knowledge does not exist.
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Mother-tongue education, Oloruntoba-Oju explained, is not merely a cultural indulgence; it is foundational to thought itself. It is the language through which a child first names the world, makes sense of relationships, and develops confidence in expression. It performs both linguistic and affective functions—shaping not only what a child knows, but who the child believes themselves to be. To remove that foundation at the earliest stages of learning is to destabilise the entire educational edifice.
More troubling still, the professor argued, is the historical irony of the policy. Even under colonial rule, indigenous languages—dismissively labelled “vernaculars”—were permitted in primary education. The current directive, therefore, is not an advance beyond colonial logic but a regression deeper into it. Where colonial administrations acknowledged the pedagogical necessity of mother tongues, independent Nigeria now appears willing to erase them from the classroom altogether.
The rationale for this reversal, Oloruntoba-Oju noted, remains opaque. It is unsupported by science, unanchored in evidence, and disconnected from Nigeria’s sociolinguistic reality. What it offers instead is a seductive but false promise: that early immersion in English will automatically produce globally competitive citizens. What it is far more likely to produce, he warned, is confusion.
The slow bleeding of indigenous languages
The consequences of this policy cannot be understood in abstraction. Nigeria’s indigenous languages, Oloruntoba-Oju argued, are already under severe strain. What the policy threatens to do is push them closer to collapse. Drawing on empirical studies and everyday observation, he painted a stark picture of linguistic decline across the continent. African languages, he said, are dying progressively—not only minor tongues, but major ones long assumed to be secure. Yoruba, one of Nigeria’s most widely spoken languages, is “haemorrhaging badly.”
In homes, playgrounds and classrooms, English words increasingly replace indigenous vocabulary. Through unchecked code-mixing, children absorb substitutes without ever learning the original terms. Over time, the linguistic bloodstream thins. What remains is a language increasingly unable to carry complex thought, stripped of precision, nuance and depth.
The English-only policy accelerates this process dramatically. By banning mother-tongue instruction outright, the state effectively confers on English the status of Nigeria’s primary language of legitimacy. Indigenous languages are reduced to informal artefacts—acceptable in the private sphere, dispensable in public life, and irrelevant to intellectual advancement. In practical terms, the policy pronounces English the de facto mother tongue of Nigerians.
The implications are profound. Attitudes toward indigenous languages, already burdened by decades of colonial hierarchy, will further deteriorate. Children will internalise the idea that their first languages are obstacles to success rather than vehicles of understanding. A crisis of identity—already visible—will deepen. “What we risk,” Oloruntoba-Oju warned, “is our international shame as a people without a language.”
Bilingualism, reconsidered
Nigeria often congratulates itself on being a multilingual nation. But the lecture dismantled this comforting narrative with clinical precision. True bilingualism, Oloruntoba-Oju argued, is rare. It requires the ability to use two languages effectively and appropriately across personal, educational, social and professional contexts. By that standard, few Nigerians qualify. Instead, the country is home to what he described as a spectrum of linguistic precarity.
Most educated Nigerians, he explained, are subtractive bilinguals—S-bilinguals—who acquire English proficiency only by losing competence in their mother tongues. Others fall into the category of dormant or deficient bilinguals—D-bilinguals—hesitant speakers who rely heavily on code-mixing, borrowing fragments from one language to compensate for gaps in the other.
Most alarming of all are precarious semilinguals, or P-semilinguals: children and young people who are inadequately proficient in both English and their indigenous languages. They cannot write or speak English with confidence, yet they are equally unable to express complex ideas in their mother tongues. This, Oloruntoba-Oju stressed, is not linguistic diversity. It is linguistic failure. The English-only policy, by stripping children of strong early grounding in their first languages, will expand this category dramatically. Far from producing fluent English speakers, it will entrench double deficiency—students stranded between languages, at home in neither.
Language does not exist in isolation. It lives through culture—through theatre, music, media and everyday performance. Oloruntoba-Oju’s lecture traced how these domains have both mirrored and magnified Nigeria’s linguistic crisis. Colonial legacies, inconsistent government policies and the prestige accorded to English in popular culture have combined to erode indigenous languages. Even theatre, once a powerful vehicle for cultural transmission, often defaults to English or diluted hybrids in the pursuit of broader audiences.
The result, he argued, is a “postcolonial cacophony”—a noisy, unresolved struggle over language, power and identity. He invoked the intellectual exchanges between the late Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Nigeria’s Biodun Jeyifo as emblematic of this tension: a continent still debating whether its languages are tools of liberation or burdens to be shed. Nigeria’s current policy choice, Oloruntoba-Oju suggested, answers that question in the most troubling way possible.
The cost to nationhood
The warnings issued at LAUTECH were not confined to cultural loss. They extended into education, science, technology and national cohesion. In his welcome address, the Vice-Chancellor, Prof. Razaq Olatunde Rom Kalilu, represented at the event, underscored that scientific and technological advancement depends on strong linguistic foundations. Language policy, he noted, must be coherent if it is to support economic and social development.
The Dean of the Faculty, Prof. Temisan Ebijuwa, echoed this concern, emphasising that language in Nigeria is inseparable from identity, power relations, education, social mobility and national integration. Oloruntoba-Oju went further. Linguistic incoherence, he argued, breeds social incoherence. A society unable to communicate clearly with itself struggles to build trust, consensus and belonging. When children grow up linguistically displaced, their connection to community and nation weakens. The consequences, he warned, are not abstract. They ripple into insecurity, alienation and fragmentation.
Yet the lecture was not an exercise in despair. It was a summons. Reversing Nigeria’s linguistic decline, Oloruntoba-Oju argued, requires a deliberate return to a mother-tongue-centred language policy, particularly in early education. Children must be anchored first in the languages that shape their thought, before being guided—systematically and effectively—into additional tongues.
But government action alone will not suffice. “All hands must be on deck,” he insisted. Media organisations must resist and regulate excessive code-mixing in indigenous language programmes. Theatre practitioners and artists must reclaim African languages as vehicles of serious expression. Public spaces—billboards, signage, announcements—must once again reflect Nigeria’s linguistic diversity. Individuals, too, must consciously value and transmit their languages. Language policy, he concluded, is not peripheral. It is existential.
When the lecture ended, applause filled the hall—but it was thoughtful applause, heavy with recognition. Many attendees described the address as incisive, passionate and unsettlingly timely. Long after the audience dispersed, its arguments lingered. If Nigeria continues on its present course, Oloruntoba-Oju warned, it risks raising generations linguistically unmoored—detached from their heritage, uncertain in expression, and ill-prepared for the intellectual demands of modern life.
African languages, he reminded the hall, are not relics. They are living systems of knowledge, memory and identity. To exile them from the classroom is to weaken the nation at its roots. And once a nation forgets its first words, it may speak loudly to the world—yet say very little about who it truly is. To silence indigenous languages, as Oloruntoba-Oju strongly warned, is to silence generations, erasing not just speech, but memory, knowledge and the future itself.
