Your article was well researched.

There are certainly challenges in ‘universalising’ policies in countries such as Nigeria.

Muslim North was literate before the conquest by the British.

Southern Nigeria was illiterate.

Yet, because power and the governance system derived from White men, English gained supremacy.

In an interaction with a Chinese, a Nigerian man introduced himself as having a PhD in English literature. The Chinese, puzzled, asked: you don’t have your own literature?

We are challenged because we are a nation of many tribes, where millions had no literacy before the White man came, so accepted English as the only passport to learning.

I once wrote to an educated Hausa lady in Hausa. She wrote back and said she could only read with extreme difficulty because she was never taught Hausa language in writing.

The Arabs were conscious of the need to learn all fields of knowledge in their language, and went on to translate all branches into their language. They could do this because they were, are, one people. Even in Eastern Africa many chose Swahili as national language  although there were other traditional languages in existence.

I think in some Southern African countries politicians used to go to campaign rallies addressing people in English even though the people were predominantly illiterate.

I am old enough to have experienced learning in Hausa in the first four years of primary school in Northern Nigeria. If I can’t remember anything from that experience, I remember some aspect of arithmetic. Ounce is represented as Oz in English. So when taught in Hausa it was translated as Oza.

Southern Nigeria assimilated English through Pidgin. So right from infancy, a child knew English words for daily needs. Southern elites speak to their children in their homes in English. Few Hausa elites do that. Evangelists such as Tunde Bakare conduct their service totally in English: not in Pidgin, not in Yoruba.

Hausa can serve as a language of instruction in the whole of Northern Nigeria. However, Hausa leaders do not have that vision, so they refused to invest in the indigenisation of knowledge through translation of books into Hausa. Moreover, their foolish responses over the years with regards to religious provocations turned tribes who use Hausa as lingua franca into implacable enemies.

Core Northern states can still indigenise knowledge into Hausa, allowing minister Alausa to take up his residence at Buckingham Palace with neither envy nor grudge from Hausawa ( Hausa people)

Abdullahi Musa writes from Kano.