This same South Africans are blaming our Government for been loose and inconsistent. They said they have been having their ways in Nigeria because our Government are hopeless. I'm currently pursuing some further studies in one of the European countries where English language is the first language. And it is my first time of studying alongside so many different people from different nationalities and continents of the world. And some of these fellow students happen to be of pure English origin.
As English is the language of teaching and learning here, I started out with a high expectation towards these Englishmen/women colleagues of mine who are mostly young adults like me. High expectation in terms of their being there to lead in class communication and showing all others the best way to use this precious language of theirs which they must be very proud of, in my opinion, because of their forebears glorious success in making the language world's number one, if you understand what I mean.
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Little did I know, however, that one of my first class presentations and a particular word that I used, will open up an interesting conversation and a window of clarity on something I have subconsciously believed in as our African folly particularly being carried on in a country like Nigeria.
The word was ACCESSION. Because of the usual debate over the best definition for any academic subject concept as can be found in almost all the academic disciplines by anyone who has studied in a third level educational setting, I was proposing that I would use the word “Capacity Accession” to supplant for the term “capacity building or capacity development” which are equally bogged down with such usually very confusing definitional debates as earlier mentioned. And my English friends wanted to know what the word ACCESSION means. At first I was shocked and showed it when I joked in my reply to the one who asked the question that he should be the living dictionary in the classroom at that moment. But in their characteristic Western honesty and curiorsity, he said he had no idea what the word means and demonstrated that when he failed the probing guess-what-it-means questioning from the lecturer. Impressed by this impressive English language skills of Nigerians, which he had obviously heard about before but had never experienced first hand, he cornered me for some conversation after class to express his delight, and we got talking.
Of course I told him not to praise me because – and it is true – I don't even know the language well enough and still feel extremely inadequate in spoken English despite the fact that I was born into it and have spent all my school years so far, now spanning over 20 years, learning English. I ended by telling him that if he however want to be really impressed, he should read Nigerian writers especially in the local newspapers or listen to Nigerians at home talk in the media about their country's problems. You will be really impressed at our English language skills, I told him, but this same skill is the greatest evidence of our Nigerian stupidity which has kept us as the very unfortunate, suppose-to-be-wealthy but so-poor-and-devastated country as the whole world currently sees us. And he replied jokingly, “well I'll take that to mean that a Nigerians writer or speaker can write or speak so much good English but actually understands so little about what he, the writer or speaker is even saying in English”. Grand joke!!
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The joke wasn't his invention, anyway. In fact, he was only paraphrasing me to show that he understood, this time, what I was talking to him about in parables during our conversation. All that grammar by Nigerians always end up meaning nothing! “We really know stuff in Nigeria”, and I'm coming to appreciate from a first hand international vantage point the possibility that Nigerians might even be “speaking better English than the English people themselves”. Yes, one of the problems we have in Nigeria is this indulgence in showing off that we know how to 'blow' grammar over whatever issue that there is in the country at any particular moment but which in actual sense we ourselves understand only very little, or mean almost nothing of them whenever we talk about these issues with those beautiful English grammar resulting in our ending up doing absolutely nothing beyond our cheap circus small talking in English language about these issues at hand.
So what exactly am I actually pointing at? President Yar'Adua, since you asked. When is he stepping down or when are Nigerians going to assert that he leave office? Not at all with any prejudice towards physical disability but in vital tune with a great fact that this president has not achieved any tangible thing commensurate to the great fortune his administration and democratic dispensation has cost Nigeria so far since his now more than two years in office. This is what all Nigerians, particularly the media and the newspapers, should be saying now, in few words, with very little English, with all vital and huge actions than plenty words. But what are we seeing in our local Nigerian media and larger society today? The same old 'talk talk!' Time again for enough people to come forward only to demonstrate that they had Cambridge and Oxford Distinction in English language. Time to talk it all away and end up achieving nothing again.
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