Kenya and Nigeria’s spoken English
These are not the best of times for Nigerians in their relationship with other Africans. As if I was being prophetic, I warned our people in this newspaper against their
These are not the best of times for Nigerians in their relationship with other Africans. As if I was being prophetic, I warned our people in this newspaper against their tendency to show off their successes to their hosts particularly on the African continent. The madness of some of them crowning some of their leaders as kings was bound to draw negative reactions from their hosts. Now South African blacks are again demonstrating against Nigerians and in some cases killing them.
I am happy to know that our government has asked our mission in South Africa to arrange repatriation for Nigerians who wish to return home. There may not be many of our people who would choose to come home. But it is a good thing that the government has publicly offered to bring those who are willing home. In this patriotic and humanitarian gesture, we should be prepared to help other West Africans who may seek our help.
Even if there are no jobs waiting for them at least their lives will not be forfeited to the deranged mobs in South Africa. Who is to blame for hatred of Nigerians in some of the places our people go to as economic migrants? It is the character of immigrants to succeed because they are very determined to be successful against the apparent indolent indigenous peoples. In this situation, the immigrants must demonstrate wisdom and not rub their success in the face of their hosts. Professor Chinua Achebe of revered memory warned the Igbo people against their penchant for this tendency and not giving a damn for the feelings of their hosts even in Nigeria and outside Nigeria. The old professor has been proved right by the hostilities to Igbo immigrants in Ghana, Togo and Benin and now in Southern Africa. The Yoruba people have a saying that if one’s yam after harvest, turns out to be the biggest in the community, one doesn’t eat it in the public but in the closet of one’s house to avoid jealousy. It however seems when some of our compatriots move out of Nigeria, they assume that “the earth is the Lord’s” and display absolute ignorance of the ownership of land in a foreign country.
Recently President William Ruto of Kenya apparently in jest and in private ridiculed the way some of our people speak English. He went on to say that when a Nigerian speaks English, he had to hire an interpreter to explain what the speaker is saying. This statement became public and President Ruto said he did not mean any harm and he was not talking about his “Brother Tinubu”. It seems the Kenyan political hierarchy likes to joke about Nigerians. It is either about Nigerian pastors or leaders! The late Kenya politician, Raila Oginga Odinga used to tell stories about politicians embezzling total budgets without execution of any projects. He even used to mention names of Nigerian cabinet ministers engaged in these sordid deeds. I am not sure if he was ever called to explain his undiplomatic vituperations.
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If I was in government, I would have told him off because it is a case of a pot calling the kettle black. Nigeria needs not worry about these kinds of insults from smaller African countries. It reminds me of what President George Walker Bush said about global conferences where the smallest and inconsequential countries seemed to speak loudest and longest. When I was ambassador of Nigeria to Germany and whenever we had African-German meetings, countries like Togo, Cape Verde and other small countries like Rwanda, and Burundi used to exasperate the German Foreign Office by wanting to dominate discussions while the Germans always looked in the direction of the Nigerian ambassador and were eager to yield the floor to Nigeria.
I also deliberately kept quiet while the smaller countries wanted to be noticed. There is always a price for size and importance in international community. If the bigger countries do not have the tolerance for the smaller countries, nothing would be accomplished. This was the case of Germany in the European Union and Nigeria in ECOWAS and the African Union. The United States for years has borne with equanimity the image of the “Ugly American” because that is the price for leadership. Regional or global hegemons have to bear the burdens of their hegemony. I hope this is the attitude of the political leadership in Nigeria. It is difficult especially when one considers what our country has done for the liberation of Africa. Starting from President William Ruto’s Kenya where our lawyers like Chief H. O Davies provided defence counsel for Jomo Kenyatta during his Mau Mau trials in the late 1950s. Even if we agree with Ruto that Kenyans speak better English than Nigerians, my answer is and so what? Is English our mother language? Is ability to speak English the yardstick of development? Do they speak English in China, Germany, Japan and Korea to mention some important non-English speaking countries?
Ruto should also know this writer has problems understanding the Kikuyi-influenced English spoken by some Kenyans. This was my experience when I was in Bonn relating to my Kenyan colleague. I don’t mean as an insult! Yes, Ruto may be correct because even I as a Nigerian sometimes have problems understanding the English spoken by fellow Nigerians because our “Nigerian English” is heavily influenced by our local languages. I can determine which part of Nigeria someone comes from by just listening to the kind of English the person speaks. In fact, we laugh and joke about this and I don’t see why it should bother us. But as a university professor, we should ensure our people speak the kind of English that the rest of the Anglophone world would understand. As long as English is one of our national languages and the most important language of officialdom, we should ensure we teach it and speak it well. The good thing about Nigeria is that no matter how heavily influenced the English in this country is by our local languages, our people seem to write English well. This is evidenced by the variety of our national newspapers and the quality of most of them which is largely unequalled in many African countries. Do I need to remind President William Ruto that Wole Soyinka won the Nobel Prize in literature in English? In retrospect, I wish he had won it using Yoruba as medium of expression even though is work is heavily laced with Yoruba idioms.
In all these issues of jealousy which cause a lot of us irritation, we just have to take them in stride. The late President Nelson Mandela publicly declared in his lifetime that if the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) were to be restructured to include Africa‘s representation, the African choice should be Nigeria. Although nowadays, Egypt, South Africa, Morocco and Kenya with backing from outside Africa see themselves as viable permanent members of the UNSC.
Nigeria must continue to provide leadership in Africa as it used to do. Our people get naturally incensed that our support for the rest of Africa is not always reciprocated. People constantly say our Southern African brothers and sisters are not grateful for our support in the liberation struggle during which time our government spent billions of dollars to help in freeing Congo DRC, Angola, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Mozambique and South Africa from settler domination and occupation. It was not only our government that supported them individually, Nigerians contributed a part of their monthly salaries to the liberation fund. Some of the leaders of these countries attended universities in Nigeria and their presidents -in waiting, lived abroad as princes at our expense. Nigeria sacrificed its own development for the sake of making provision for the freedom of trampled upon and dominated African humanity, not for what we hoped to benefit in future, but certainly not for the killing and humiliation of Nigerians who moved to these countries to provide services which because of their educational deficiency, our African compatriots cannot yet provide. These are the facts and Nigerians who complain about lack of post-liberation dividends must understand that Nigeria is not expected to behave like a typical imperialist power demanding payment for our support for the liberation for fellow Africans under European or settler racist domination. Our support was based on what our prime minister, Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, said in our maiden United Nations declaration in 1960 that our independence was not complete if fellow Africans were being discriminated against and dominated because of the pigment of their skin. In other words, our support for other Africans was in our enlightened self-interest.
