"Vox audit perit, litera scripta manet"

That the results of this year's secondary school leaving examinations are the worst since records began is cause for concern, albeit an expected bit of news. Given the rot that has set in our education sector, the decline of standards, and the lack of government interest in anything related to education in this country, it was only a matter of time before such results came about. I believe that the point we have reached is one where teachers who were properly trained, dedicated and motivated have almost all retired from the system. The generation that they trained directly are almost all gone as well, so what we are left with are those for whom teaching is not at all a calling. Sorry folks, but it is going to get worse.

Consider this scenario: a Professor in UNIBEN, he trained under the supervision of some of the best lecturers in the world in the early 1970s, and was absorbed into UNIBEN in the mid 1970s. In those days, the incentives were there, a car and a flat upon recruitment. Then in the 1980s he trained a set of PhD students, but those students could not go abroad because by that time, SAP was on the map, and it was no longer fashionable to send students abroad so that they could come back to be 'common' lecturers. Those students did not get the exposure needed by an academic in today's increasingly globalised (and competitive) society.

Then those half-baked lecturers, trained another set of students, whom it must be stressed were not the best in class. Prof. A who got into the system in the 1970s should have retired by now, or is preparing to retire. Prof. B, who was Prof. A's student should be at the pinnacle of his career, while Dr. C who was less than a quarter-baked should be submitting his professorial thesis within this same system since it no longer meets international standards. Think of the effects in another 10 years when he trains student D. Student D it must be said was probably not the best student in his class, but the one who could not get a job offer in one of the few companies in Nigeria that pay a decent wage.

Back to the WAEC results...

An outcry has been raised over the performance of the students in the core subjects of English and Mathematics. It is the opinion of this writer that the real tragedy here is the Mathematics performance, not English. Before I go on, I must confess that I tend to get irritated when I see English butchered on paper, but living for a few years among the English themselves, and seeing how badly they perform at their own language, I have had to revise that thinking.

I believe that language is a living thing like any other, and like any other thing that has a life, it grows, matures, evolves, and those that cannot compete will die. This is my bluntly harsh assessment of what is happening to a lot of our native languages, and to the English language in Nigeria. These languages would be all but dead before the current generation of thirty-something's pass away as those who spoke them most fluently belong to a generation before our own parents, and what is worse, they didn't write their languages down. Hence, the opening quote I appended is correct.

It is funny this thing about indigenous speakers, because one thing I know for certain is this: my recently deceased grandmother, born in 1918, knew that the Igbo word for spoon is ngaji, but the trend in my mother's generation is, 'Biko nyem spoon' (Please give me the spoon), in other words, the word ngaji is slowly being overtaken by the word spoon and by the time my own generation is dead and buried, there will be precious few people who would know what ngaji is. How many Igbo speakers know what enyinya means?

In Nigeria, it is my opinion that of all our indigenous languages, Hausa would survive longest, and that is because of all of them it is the one that was most standardised before the colonists came around, thanks to the Ajami script. The Yoruba also had the Ajami as a result of Uthman dan Fodio's Jihad two centuries ago, but they promptly discarded it when Samuel Crowther transcribed their language with the Latin script half a century later. The Igbo had the Nsibidi script, and we weren't the only ones who used it. Unfortunately, like us, the Efik and Ibibio kept knowledge of Nsibidi within a very small elite, and mainly for religious purposes. When the British came around with their religion and many of our people converted, those who had knowledge of Nsibidi became irrelevant and died. With them died a lot of knowledge that would have been very useful. Nowadays, even fluent speakers of both Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba read and comprehend English a lot quicker than they do any of their own dialects. I learned Igbo at 17, and up until today my accent sucks, and this is increasingly reflected in kids all across Nigeria. But there isn't anything to worry about really. The entire process of our languages dying is as natural as the fact the we will all one day be dead.

But then what is happening to English in Nigeria?

You see, language is all about communication, and the English language as we know it today, is not the same as it was a hundred years ago, not to talk of during the time of William Shakespeare. Consider this sentence in German, "Mein haus ist ihr haus", which is very similar to the English, "My house is your house". The origins of the English language are distinctly German, and what is today's English is a pidgin version of the language spoken by the Germanic Saxons. Over time it borrowed words from other languages, adapted them and forged its own identity. That process was driven by young people, new generations. Pidgin English is becoming more the de facto official language in our country, and it is gradually assuming a life of its own. Words are borrowed from indigenous languages to 'funkify' a conversation, and suddenly those words supplant the original English word in Pidgin. The result is that 'fashi dat syd' now means the same thing anywhere in Nigeria and almost all Nigerians get what it means despite the fact that the root word 'fash' is of Yoruba origin. The English word leave has been dropped.

This seemingly little thing caught my attention the last time I was in Abuja. Jamiu, my favourite mi shai in Wuse II now understands perfectly what I meant in Pidgin, and I didn't have to speak Hausa to him. When he goes back to Kaura Namoda, he will take with him his knowledge of Pidgin, and with time, Pidgin will also begin to supplant Hausa as the language of trade, then ultimately as the language of choice in Northern Nigeria an entirely natural process which means that a language that can truly be called Nigerian is slowly emerging from the corpses of our ethnic tongues.

My view: from this slow but certain event, we are witnessing the birth of a nation. Our local languages may just have to die so that Nigeria can live.

P.S: For the records, enyinya means horse in the Igbo language.