Every few weeks, months or years, a new article or social media furore appears to talk about nepotism in Nigerian politics. Particularly, the trend of biological children running for political office in the footsteps of their parents.
The anger is understandable.
In a country where corruption is everywhere, the people feel cheated by their leaders, and the usefulness of elections is questionable. There is a real sense of fear and anger in seeing the children of the elite running for public office. Will we be governed by the same families forever? When will we get out of their grip?
Yet there is a real handicap here, one that rarely gets discussed. Many of these children are handicapped by the very realities of their "eliteness", in a manner that makes them running for public office far less practical than we might imagine.
The candidate who answered in English Last week, a debate about speaking Yoruba was sparked when Gbadebo Rhodes-Vivour (GRV), the African Democratic Congress candidate for the Lagos governorship, was challenged at The Platform's Independence Day edition on what he would do to preserve Yoruba culture, tradition and language. The question was asked in Yoruba (as a trap), Mr Rhodes-Vivour answered in English (The Platform’s language). Members of the audience protested and insisted he answer in Yoruba, pulling him into a known area of weakness.
Lagos is a cosmopolitan melting pot, and after English, Yoruba is the predominant language spoken. So people who move from other areas in Nigeria do their best to learn the language. Though he affirmed that "Lagos is Yorubaland" and that language carries a people's culture and heritage, Mr Rhodes-Vivour struggled to complete a proverb in Yoruba so he switched to English and made an argument that governance isn’t strictly about language.
I agree with GRV that governance is beyond speaking a language. Not speaking your mother tongue doesn't render anyone incompetent or incapable of governing or representing their people. It does threaten the legitimacy of claiming to fully understand the needs and aspirations of those people they aspire or claim to serve.
Despite this, we may be better off with smart administrators who don’t (yet) speak the language, as long as they have the willingness to, and the capacity to deliver for their people.
Incumbents who speak the language haven’t necessarily governed Lagos in the best manner possible. As an entrepôt, and Nigeria’s largest economy, Lagos has a natural ability to grow, free from the tentacles of the federal government. Yet, it suffers congestion and infrastructural deficits that betray the governments competence, or lack of it. Why not try someone who has capacity, even if language is their weakness?
Anyway, the episode shows some lack of preparation on GRVs part for the election he is running in. Four years ago, he went through the same issues, straddling his Yoruba and Igbo identities while facing xenophobic attacks on his fitness for office because his mother was Igbo. It was wrong for people to do that, and wrong for politicians to condone it.
Yet it is naive that Mr Rhodes-Vivour did not sharpen his command of the language until he could speak it without an accent and allay fears that he cannot connect, in Yoruba, with the people he wishes to govern. To be frank, people learn the basics of a language in less than four years and can become conversational. So I see no reason why he couldn’t try harder.
There is some precedence to my opinion.
"I may speak the English language better than I speak my Chinese language, but I'll never be an Englishman in a thousand generations." — Lee Kuan Yew, 1978
Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s founding Prime Minister, didn't begin learning Mandarin until he became an adult. Today, in Singapore, bilingualism became is core part of the national identity and the education system. Mr Lee sent his own children to Chinese schools for a good part of their schooling years. He created a system where Singaporeans learn their local languages in parallel to English, and Prime Ministers often give speeches in English, Mandarin and Malay to enable them connect with the different people making up the Singaporean nation.
The irony is that Nigeria's wealthiest have chosen to send their children abroad to elite schools across the world, swapping Nigerian accents, mannerisms and cultures for British and American ones, visible cornerstones of their parents' status. But this same social ascension is what makes it so difficult for most of these heirs to truly come back home. As Mr Lee said: "A person who gets deculturalised — and I nearly was, so I know this danger — loses his self-confidence. You feel a sense of deprivation. For optimum performance, a man must know himself, know the world."
Now compare that with Idris Abiola-Ajimobi, son of a former governor of Oyo State, who failed to be elected into the state's legislature. In videos that circulated after the GRV scene, Mr Abiola-Ajimobi could barely string a sentence together in Yoruba.
I don’t blame Mr. Abiola-Ajimobi, GRV or any other person in a similar situation, the issue is a societal one with roots in colonisation, sustained by government policies that haven’t pushed back. And it doesn't stop with the elite.
Middle-class families, in a similar manner, push their children out of the country as soon as possible, to get better education and opportunities. The result is a continuous leadership and cultural gap. The mass of Nigeria's most talented end up outside the country, leaving leadership, especially in the public sector, to those lucky enough not to leave. The death of our languages, a big problem in itself, is a shadow and symptom of the wider brain drain and leadership challenges we have.
What a serious language policy would look like To fix this, Nigeria must create a language policy that ensures its children speak local languages.
Being a complicated country that it is, the second-order question is which languages do we teach, and what do we do with dialects? A delicate question that will require political awareness and capital. But we must move away from the dialect fragmentation that makes it hard for people to understand one another. That means a careful process of categorising and archiving dialects using technology, so those languages don't die forever, alongside a deliberate policy to standardise the languages spoken and increase their adoption across the country.
Take Yoruba. It has many dialects, among them Ijesha, Ijebu, Oyo and Ekiti, plus a cosmopolitan "Lagos" version you hear in the city. Getting more people to speak Yoruba means teaching the same standard Yoruba in schools across the country, dialects aside. It also means teaching in the mother tongue at primary school.
Nigeria's own National Policy on Education has promised this for decades, on paper, never in practice. More so, speaking pidgin or a local language is looked down upon! We need to go even further beyond teaching Yoruba as a subject to teaching subjects in Yoruba! It happens in East Africa!
We can then bring in foreign languages, French, Mandarin, whatever the economy demands, in the later schooling years. A child raised in Kano could end up speaking English, Yoruba, Hausa and Mandarin, with varying levels of proficiency. A policy like this would help us understand ourselves and preserve our identity, while still making it possible for us to interact in the global economy.
Nigeria needs a stronger language policy and a real approach to teaching languages, not as decoration but as the base on which the nation stands. Otherwise, the ultimate cost of deculturation will not be paid by the elite, who can afford to move and feel at home elsewhere in the world, it’ll be be borne by the Nigerian people, who may be led by people who speak their language, but are the most incompetent of the lot.