Do You Speak French? | By: Reuben Abati
from Botswana, after attending a conference organized by the Africa Leadership
Forum (ALF). This was sometime in the 90s, on that same trip was Professor
Tekena Tamuno, the eminent historian of blessed memory. We boarded an Air Afrique
flight from Johannesburg to Abidjan, where we were scheduled to join another
flight to Lagos. But Air Afrique at the time had started having problems.
flights were always delayed, services were poor, and the airline had become so
notorious it eventually earned the sobriquet: peut-etre Afrique. Peut-etre in
French meaning “perhaps or maybe.” On this particular trip, the airline lived
up to its poor reputation.
connecting flight to Lagos. Our first instinct was to go to the Nigerian
Embassy in Abidjan, after the airline had given us hotel accommodation for the
night. When Professor Tamuno and I arrived at the embassy, the Ambassador
had closed for the day. We left a message. And lo and behold, the following
morning, somebody came from the Embassy to look for us. The Ambassador, a
gentleman to the core, had received our message and he would like us to stop by
at the Embassy before our flight back to Lagos, later in the day. A good
diplomat on foreign posting will always look out for the interest of his or her
country’s citizens under whatever circumstances. We were impressed. But this is
not the point of this article. It is as the title suggests, about French
language and the need for Nigeria to take the teaching and the learning of the
language more seriously and actively promote this in our educational
institutions.
our hotel, he reportedly searched everywhere for us. We were having breakfast
in the restaurant when I suddenly heard the announcement on the Public Address
system that two Nigerians in the hotel had a visitor from the Nigerian Embassy.
I informed Professor Tamuno, and he wondered whether I could speak French. My French
was still good in those days, but French is such a precise and poetic language
that does not allow any form of stammering. And if you don’t use it regularly,
you could lose it or become so rusty that you dare not speak it again. Persons
who speak French fluently cannot tolerate any form of incoherence; one funny
look at you, you’d have no option but to shut up. So, I willingly lost my
spoken French. But when I listen, I understand what is being said.
encounters about the importance of French as a second language while attending
international conferences and in the course of my work, at a time, as a
government official. Virtually every international event has French as a major
language of communication. More people in the world speak Mandarin, Spanish and
may be Russian. But French is not just the ninth most widely spoken
language; by more than 200 million people; it is a language of international
relations, and it is the second official language. At international meetings,
there are translators who help non-speakers of the main language to follow
discussions, but French vocabulary and syntax are imbued with such special
cadence that is not fully conveyed in translation. Oftentimes, the translators
can be annoying. It is not just the same thing.
another language is a matter of strategic policy. Countries seek to
connect with their neighbours and strategic partners through language. It is
instructive that in the United States, Spanish and Mandarin are the two other
most popular languages, the learning and teaching of which is deliberately
encouraged. The United States has a large Spanish speaking population; its
neighbours in Latin America also speak Spanish; the promotion of Spanish as a
language in the United States builds many cultural bridges. Mandarin is
also popular because of the increasing population of Chinese-Americans.
active policy to strategically promote language as a vehicle of integration and
development? Nigeria is surrounded by Francophone countries: how many Nigerians
speak or understand French? When you travel to any of these Francophone
countries, or even to the Portuguese speaking ones, you can’t fail to notice
the large number of French-speaking persons who can also speak English. While
our neighbours make an effort to learn English, making it easy to relate with
them, we practically don’t make any effort to understand their own language.
And as a country, we are short-changing ourselves. It is often so embarrassing
to see many of our Foreign Affairs Ministry officials not being able to speak
any other language apart from English, or not being proficient enough, even
when they can. When Nigerians attend international conferences within the
region, they rely on translators during formal sessions and thereafter they
just stand around playing deaf and dumb. Almost all the Presidents in our
neighbouring Francophone countries speak English. The day we have a Nigerian
President who can have a decent conversation in French, we should slaughter a
cow! We need to take a second look at the policy on the teaching of languages
in our school system.
administration introduced a language policy declaring French as Nigeria’s
second official language. The objective as stated in the National Policy on
Education (2004) was mainly to “smoothen interaction with our neighbours” by
promoting the French language at the primary and secondary school level. But
since then, that policy has been only on paper. The teaching of French
language was first introduced at the secondary school level in Nigeria, around
1956, at King’s College, Lagos and Government College, Ibadan.
at the Universities of Ibadan, Ife, UNN, and Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria and
over the years, other Nigerian universities established Departments of French
or Modern Languages. Colleges of Education also later started offering
French, but only as a subject to be combined with a Nigerian language. At the
secondary school level, it was however treated as an optional subject, and it
was not taught at all at the primary school level. If there had been a
determined effort to promote French as a second official language, by now so
much progress would have been made.
reportedly living in Cote D’Ivoire alone and more in the other Francophone
countries in West Africa, particularly Niger, Chad, Togo, Cameroun, Mali and
Burkina Faso. Nigeria may be the biggest market in Africa, but access to other
West African markets makes that market even bigger. There are millions of
Nigerians travelling all over West Africa, engaged in profitable commerce on a
daily basis. Some of them pick up the French language out of necessity but a
properly executed language policy can fast-track Nigeria’s integration with the
sub-region, encourage regional commerce and promote co-operation and
understanding. We need that integration if indeed Africa is the
centre-piece of our foreign policy, beginning with our immediate neighbours.
Other West African countries and even French-speaking African countries like
Gabon and Burundi are consciously promoting the learning of English. Their stated
reason: Pragmatism!
Language defines and strengthens. I have seen situations whereby in the absence
of French or English as a connecting language, Nigerians who speak Fulfude,
Hausa and Yoruba connect so instantly with their West African brothers and
sisters who speak the same languages. Nigeria cannot effectively perform
its leadership role in the sub-region if its people do not speak or understand
the language of their neighbours. General Sani Abacha was certainly right on
this point of making French, Nigeria’s default second language. ECOWAS by the
way, is working on a West African Highway Project, from Lagos to Nouackchott.
Is that meant to be a highway of the deaf and the dumb, trapped in cultural
spaces?
linguistic integration will probably be ordinary people. Multi-lingual
Nigerians do better than their mono-lingual compatriots, relatively speaking.
To get certain international appointments, you need that extra language. A friend
told me that Akinwunmi Adesina, former Minister of Agriculture, stole the show
at the preliminary screenings for his current job as AfDB President, when he
switched to French and spoke with such power of articulation and insight. There
are thousands more. We need to produce more Nigerians like that. And we need
those other Nigerians too, who can sell whatever from Cotonou to Lome to Niger,
Chad, Abidjan and Cameroun, undeterred by language barriers, switching
linguistic codes with ease.
young. Children learn and absorb language almost by osmosis. We need to
start preparing our children for international life, within the region and
beyond, by teaching them French and for those who have the capacity, Nigerian
languages and other languages as well. We must begin to prepare our
future Presidents of international corporations, and Nigerians who will also,
in future become Secretary Generals of the United Nations and other
multilateral institutions. The obsession with wealth and the transient is
making us lose focus as a country. Our greatest asset remains our children, the
young, untainted ones, who need to be captured and built up, before they get
sucked into the prevalent, abnormal normative value system in the country.
this is not just about the teaching of French as a second official language but
more about the gaps and the chaos in Nigeria’s education system. Our
disruptive governance process, the forever-begin-again culture of governance,
truncates so many things, and the education process gets poorly served. I have
dealt with aspects of this in earlier writings and I just want to repeat the
point that the education of the Nigerian child and the re-schooling of society
are so tied to all matters of progress and development that we just cannot stop
talking about them. In the same manner in which we promote regional
integration, we should also use language to bind the country together. Nigerian
languages should be taught in schools as compulsory subjects. Where language
barriers do not exist, people are always willing to listen, and in a world
where the wisdom of the tribe prevails, we should encourage people to talk and
listen, and remove barriers.
whose parents are spending a fortune to get them to plug into this global trend
but even if those children speak all the languages of the world, they may be
lost to the country forever. They have little or no attachment to Nigeria’s
education system and their parents may not be keen about linking them to a
natal origin where electricity remains a problem, infrastructure deficit
continues to grow and the future is permanently uncertain. This is why in simple
terms, in this matter, the change process must begin at home at all
levels. In the end (you see?), everything is linked, but we are
optimistic that all will be well, because after all, we are Nigerians: we
manage to be happy in every situation. Meilleurs voeux.
Who released, killed and ate our lion? | By Reuben Abati
“I like your passion. But there was a protest in Abuja on Tuesday. I didn’t see you joining them?”
Sugabelly, rape and Audu’s sons | By: Reuben Abati
You probably don’t know Sugabelly. I don’t know her either. But it is the twitter handle of a Nigerian lady: @sugabelly, who in the wake of the death of former Governor Abubakar Audu of Kogi State felt the urge to go public with her story. My foregrounding her/story as opposed to his/story is further affirmation of an earlier submission that Audu’s death is “inconclusive”.
As the rest of Nigeria mourned the death of Abubakar Audu and pondered the implications of an inconclusive electoral process, Sugabelly showed up on social media and started celebrating his death. Her message was that the death of the man was good riddance to bad rubbish. “I feel so amazing”, she wrote. “Like God actually answered my prayers… That’s usually how it is.
Powerful people rarely remember the people whose lives they destroy.” She alleged that Audu’s sons once gang-raped her-seven of them, when she was an impressionable 17-year old and that Governor Audu used his position as a big man to rubbish her, slammed her with a $2 million libel suit, denied her from getting justice, with his lawyers insisting that “14 years” is the age of consent under the Penal Code in the FCT, and so there is no case.
For eight years, her life, she says, has been a nightmare including contemplation’s of suicide and spells of manic depression. Her frustration is well articulated in her twitter handle and an extended commentary titled “Surviving Mustapha Audu and His Rape Brigade”.
I have heard people proclaim loudly that a traditional proverb says: “the witch cried last night and the child died in the morning” and they have been wondering whether there was some kind of extra-terrestrial, meta-physical animus which led to Audu’s sudden death.
Howbeit, Sugabelly’s allegation is that of unlawful carnal knowledge. Her protestation made the rounds for a few days largely uncelebrated, but it caught fire last Friday. For days, rape was the subject of discussion on Nigerian twitter. Opinion was divided with some calling Sugabelly, “a whore” and a badly brought up child but soon, the weight tilted heavily in her favour as the reactions panned out to focus on the menace of sexual assault against women and the devastating effect on persons, families, the victims and society.
One of the sons of Abubakar Audu was soon fingered as the leader of the rape brigade -by both Sugabelly and her staunchest supporter, @Echecrates. What happened subsequently is better experienced. A lady tweeting as Zahra – @oakleafbycg – jumped into the fray to defend him – hers was quite a spirited fight that lasted for hours, defending the integrity of her husband. She probably was defending herself too.
Her father-in-law was so close to being governor and he lost it, only for some twitter activists, and a sugabelly (what a name! by the way) to start suggesting that her husband has a rape case to answer. She is a good woman, isn’t she? I monitored the conversations, and it is difficult to conclude that anyone was successfully convicted for there were persons who raised questions about sugabelly’s identity, her motives and whether she is not just a spoiler, playing a sponsored political game.
The emergent consensus, however, focused on the menace of rape in our society. Some male commentators seeking to genderize the discussion also pointed out that they were once raped, too, but the pervasive impression was that young girls are more often the victims. I noted that there was very little talk about marital rape, which is ordinarily a major issue in the West, but which will be considered absurd by Africans.
There were some suggestions about rapists being put to death in line with the still untested Violence Against Persons Act, but as is the case with twitter, 140-word interventions do not necessarily an honest thinker or an intellectual make. It creates an illusion though, the illusion that someone whose reasoning is below 140 words is a mega-man of knowledge and insights.
Nonetheless, the matter between sugabelly and the Audu sons deserves a little more probing. I am tempted to commend sugabelly for throwing up the subject, but the real problem with rape in our society lies in the inadequacy of both legal and social responses. Both the law and the society stigmatise rape, and wrong-foot the victim. The relevant sections of the law in Nigeria today more or less ridicule the victim, and usually, the victim is female.
The biggest challenge for decades has been this manner in which the law humiliates the female victim: the procedure requires examination by a medical doctor and in open court, proving actual penetration up to the labia majora. That is a tough call for victims and families, and so, many cases end up unreported. Besides, the criminal justice system peopled by phallocentric officials is wont to dismiss any woman reporting rape: in Nigeria, it would be ridiculous indeed for a married woman or a girlfriend to report being raped by her husband or fiancée. From the policeman at the station to the presiding judge, if it gets to that stage, the case may die a natural death in the vortex of misogyny.
Culture is a major barrier: the search for virgins at the bridal chamber by African families is a long dead custom, but few families can stand the stigma of taking as wife, a woman who has been raped, and whose indignity has been broadcast.
Female victims are, therefore, reluctant to seek legal redress, first because of social stigma, and that is why there are very few convictions despite the regular incidence of rape. Any woman that is labeled a rape victim stands the risk of not getting a husband: families of prospective suitors will latch on to that evidence as if it is a mark of leprosy, and urge their sons to steer clear, creating for the woman’s family an undeserved dilemma. Despite the wave of modernity in our land, tradition remains resilient and marriage, going to a man’s house, is still, quite sadly, considered a woman’s ultimate achievement.
This is probably why, in due course, the accused also showed up in the conversation releasing e-mail exchanges between him and Sugabelly, and going as far as revealing her true identity and painting her as a “whore,” a liar and an opportunist. Parents, keep an eye on your sons and daughters! The family, the most important social unit, has a role to play.
Both male and female children should be brought up to respect ethical values and the rights of other human beings to dignity. The inferiorisation of the female gender often begins in the home, and there are too many cultural paradigms sustaining an objectionable model of parenting, which must change. Too many parents, too busy trying to make survival possible, have abdicated responsibility and it is society that is hurt as a result.
The solution also lies in legal reform: the laws on rape must become more progressive and enlightened. The statutes have been in urgent need of review for long; they must provide the necessary deterrence and not ridicule the victim; even the Violence Against Persons Act (2015) does not fully correct the mischief in the Criminal and Penal Codes.
There is also a trend now that must be addressed; namely, the objectification of women for profit or other purposes. The most recent illustration I find is the battle being waged on twitter and instagram by @blossomnnodim, who has since changed to @blossomozurumba (good luck to the man who is responsible for this blossoming), as she takes on a TBWA power charger advert, which instead of promoting the subject focuses on a woman’s biological gifts.
Blossom objects to this but she has since been accused of witch-hunting and idleness. Her critics miss the point. The objectification of women in popular culture erodes the dignity of women. But the worse of it all is that women themselves promote this negative effect. Nigeria has been lucky in locking into global trends on all fronts, but in a global village, we have not been successful in retaining local standards as a bulwark against negative, imperial cultural influences.
Social media, for example, is dominated by images of sexual libertinism; even our young ladies who are now role models on the basis of concrete accomplishments help to foster this image. I am making this point delicately; my concern is that we have too many Nigerian female role models who are busy trying to be like Amber Rose, Nicki Minaj, Rihanna, Kim Kardashian, Kylie Jenner, Rita Ora, Miles Cyrus, Blac Chyna – if you know what I mean, all those foreign cultural icons whose lifestyles commodify women.
Our own equivalents are all over social media: pretty girls who are perpetually showing cleavages, wearing body tights that accentuate curves, some even boast that they won’t wear bras and pants and that illicit sex is cool: that is how this self-denigration has grown all the way down, creating a sexual tension even among the uneducated wannabes. I am not victimizing the victim, knowing full well that there is that human rights border of freedom of choice and expression; still, new cultural realities should command certain limits.
Sugabelly may not get the sugar of contentment that she seeks, but let her be consoled that she has ignited a debate that may shed more light on the dilemma of rape, and/or sex with a minor (Penal Code or not), and the sad manner in which our society continues to produce children and adults who behave badly. Let us also hope that sooner or later, the sleeping Abubakar Audu will be allowed to lie, by his sons and the girl they allegedly raped.
It is not Audu that is on trial, it is his sons: sons of big men who go overboard with their life of privilege, and of course, Sugabelly- the overtly impressionable young girl- who are all still alive to be called to account, if not in regular court, but now, in the court of public opinion.
The Phones No Longer Ring | By: Reuben Abati
GEJ orders that #BringBackGoodluck2015 banners be taken down
There’s something I really don’t get here. The President never knew about the banners? Interesting!!! According to reports, President Goodluck Jonathan has ordered that the #BringBackGoodluck2015 banners hung at different locations in Abuja be taken down.
Needless to say the #BringBackGoodluck2015 hashtag has not only be found offensive by Nigerians but members of the international community have also expressed their disgust. He released a statement via his aide, Dr Reuben Abati.
“President Jonathan wholly shares the widely expressed view that the signs which were put up without his knowledge or approval are a highly insensitive parody of the #BringBackOurGirls hash tag.
While President Jonathan appreciates the enthusiastic show of support for his administration by a broad range of stakeholders, he condemns the #BringBackJonathan2015 signs which appear to make light of the very serious national and global concern for the abducted Chibok girls.
The President assures all Nigerians and the international community that his administration remains fully engaged with efforts to rescue the abducted girls and that he will not knowingly promote any actions that will fly in the face of the seriousness of their plight and the anguish of their families.”