The language that holds us back

The Language That Holds Us Back: Rethinking English and the Architecture of Nigerian Development

It began, innocently enough, with laughter.
One afternoon, my wife and I were engaged in a serious conversation about a pressing national issue. The room held the weight of our concern—until she suddenly broke into laughter. I paused, startled by the intrusion of amusement into a solemn moment. She quickly clarified that her laughter wasn’t directed at the subject of our discussion but at my pronunciation of the word “gossip.”
As an Ijesa man, I had rendered it confidently and sincerely as “gos–ship,” inserting an aspirated “h” where the English language insisted there should be none. We both laughed, but afterwards, the moment refused to leave my mind. It reminded me of a viral video I had seen recently: a student from Ondo State being mocked for his English accent. These two unrelated incidents converged into a larger realization—one that has haunted me ever since: English, the legacy of colonial rule, may be one of the greatest impediments to our national development.

The Mirage of the “Official Language”

This private reflection soon collided with public discourse when I encountered a headline proclaiming that the Tinubu administration had approved an “official language” for teaching in all schools. My heart lifted. I imagined that, perhaps at long last, Nigeria had summoned the courage to elevate its indigenous languages to the status they deserve. But my optimism dissolved midway through the article.
The official language in question was English.

The justification was dressed in the language of policy and statistics. According to data, students taught in indigenous languages performed worse in national examinations than their English-instructed counterparts. Based on this interpretation, the government reversed the 2022 National Language Policy, which had mandated that children—from early childhood through primary six—be taught in their mother tongue or in the dominant language of their community.

This earlier policy, though imperfect, was one of the most forward-looking educational decisions in our nation’s history. Its reversal underscores a deeper issue: the Nigerian state continues to misunderstand the relationship between language, cognition, and development.

The Deep Roots of Linguistic Insecurity

From the earliest days of schooling, Nigerians are inducted into a hierarchy of languages where English sits at the top—untouchable, unquestioned, revered. Indigenous languages are condemned to the margins, labeled “vernacular,” a term that carries centuries of colonial disdain.
Children caught speaking their native tongues during school hours were punished, sometimes severely. The result was a strange psychological wound: students associated their mother tongue with shame, backwardness, and a lack of sophistication.

This phenomenon is well-documented in postcolonial linguistics. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, in his seminal work Decolonising the Mind, argues that the suppression of native languages produces a deeper suppression of self. The individual begins to see the world through the eyes of the colonizer, evaluating their own identity through a foreign lens.

This is precisely what Fela Kuti called colonial mentality—a sustained and systematic devaluation of the self in favor of inherited structures of domination.

Language as Cognitive Architecture

At its core, language is not merely a tool for communication. It is a cognitive framework—a structure through which we process information, interpret the world, and understand abstraction. Children think first in the language they hear from birth. Research in cognitive linguistics shows that concepts are more easily grasped when conveyed through the learner’s native language because linguistic familiarity reduces cognitive load.

This makes our educational structure deeply flawed. We take children whose minds are wired in Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa, Ijaw, Tiv, Fulfulde, Edo, or any of Nigeria’s hundreds of languages, and we immerse them in an alien linguistic system before they have mastered its logic. Then we teach them mathematics, science, and logic using that same alien system.

The result is predictable: confusion, fear, poor comprehension, and lifelong aversion to certain subjects.

I speak from experience. Mathematics felt like a hostile universe throughout my early education. I memorized formulas, but rarely understood them. Only years later did I realize why: I was being taught in English, a language my six-year-old mind neither owned nor trusted.
Had Pythagoras been explained to me in Yoruba—my first language—those triangles and angles might have been less threatening, perhaps even beautiful.

The Global Evidence

History provides abundant proof of the importance of linguistic self-determination.
China, Japan, South Korea, Turkey, and Finland—nations celebrated for their educational systems—conduct their schooling in native languages. Their languages carry their science, their philosophy, their modernity. Not a single one attributes its success to adopting the tongue of a former foreign ruler.

The counterargument often raised is the example of Canada or Australia—English-speaking nations that prospered. But their histories differ drastically: they are settler colonies. The colonizers never left. Their languages were not foreign imports—they became the linguistic DNA of those societies.

Hong Kong provides perhaps the most striking illustration.
Despite a century of British rule, the people retained Cantonese as their instructional and cultural language. English floated above society as an administrative tool, but never penetrated the soul of its educational system. Hong Kong emerged as a global economic powerhouse not because of English, but because it preserved its linguistic and cultural continuity.

This is the crucial distinction:
A nation that loses its language loses its intellectual independence.

The Psychological Burden of Linguistic Foreignness

Whether we acknowledge it or not, many Black Africans wear English like a borrowed garment—carefully, nervously, self-consciously. We police each other’s accents. We mock mispronunciations. We measure intelligence not by insight but by how “polished” one sounds.

And yet, fluency in English is not a marker of intellect.
It is often merely a marker of exposure, class, or geography.

The tragedy is not that we speak English. The tragedy is that we have allowed English to become the gatekeeper of intelligence, opportunity, and national progress.

Policy Reversal as an Opportunity Lost

The 2022 language policy should not have been reversed; it should have been expanded.
Secondary schools should have gradually integrated indigenous languages as primary tools of instruction. Universities should have developed advanced academic registers in Nigerian languages—terminologies for science, law, engineering, medicine, and philosophy.

Where such registers did not exist, we could have created them. After all, every scientific term in English was invented once. Nothing stops us from developing mathematical vocabulary in Yoruba, physics metaphors in Igbo, biological taxonomies in Hausa.

Language evolves to meet the needs of its speakers.
But a language denied the chance to evolve becomes a prisoner in its own land.

The Way Forward: A Bilingual Future

The conversation should not be about abandoning English. English is a global language—it gives access to the world. But access need not come at the cost of identity or comprehension.
The ideal path for Nigeria is a bilingual educational system in which:

• Indigenous languages serve as the primary medium of instruction in early and middle education.
• English is taught as a separate subject—not as the foundation of thought.
• Curricula are culturally and linguistically contextualized.
• Teachers are trained in bilingual pedagogy.
• Academic vocabulary is deliberately developed in indigenous languages.

Such an approach would not only produce more confident learners but also a more innovative society. Creativity thrives when the mind is allowed to think in its natural language.

Reclaiming Our Linguistic Dignity

This is not merely an educational argument. It is a cultural one. A philosophical one. A psychological one.
To reclaim our languages is to reclaim our intellectual autonomy.
It is to insist that development is not something borrowed but something built.
It is to declare that our children can excel in the world without first erasing themselves.

As long as we continue to treat English as the pathway to intelligence and civilization, we will remain students in a classroom where we should long have been teachers.

🪶
J.J. Oluti
Creative Voice of Africa