Min of Science and Tech wants students taught in their local dialect

Minister of Science and Technology, Ogbonnaya Onu, recently said that the Federal Government is making plans to teach Maths and Science subjects in local dialects.

He made this known while speaking to students of Ekulu Primary School in Enugu state over the weekend.

This is what he said:

"These pupils grow up with their indigenous languages at home before they start going to school where they are now taught in foreign languages.

So, we have observed that there is a challenge to understand the foreign languages first before they could even start understanding what they are being taught. We believe that this plan will help our students to understand mathematics and the science subjects, and also promote the application of science and technology for national development.”

We have one question;

How? How do they intend to pull this off? This might seem very easy to pull of in a country with very few local languages.

For context, look at this numbers:

Nigeria has 7% the world's languages: When you sum up all the languages and dialects spoken in the world, Nigeria takes a whopping 7%.

Taraba alone has more languages and dialects than 30 African countries: And that's just Taraba alone.

Here's the big one;

Nigeria has about 521 languages, as of the last count.

So how in God's earth does the Minister plan to pull this off? Do they want to execute it with just the major languages like Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba?

It gets even more complicated.

How do they want to pull this off in regions like the South-South where we have languages like Urhobo, which also comes in different dialects?

Let's say it works (unless all the "tortoise and other stories" stories are true), at what point will the children in these little villages switch to the language the rest of the country is speaking?

We have a solution;

This might sound pretty obvious, but what if they tried a different option, the obvious, available option; how about they just teach in English?

If the English teaching is not as effective as they want, then maybe they should invest more in training the teachers to do their jobs better. Instead of spending millions translating text books and writing new ones.

As it stands, this project, if it ever sees the light of day, is doomed to fail.

Let's not even begin to talk about the politics of deciding what local language students in a community should be taught in.