Why Nigeria’s Mother Tongue Educational Policy Failed Before It Even Began

When the Federal Government formally cancelled the 2022 National Language Policy and restored English as the universal language of instruction, many Nigerians were not surprised. To them, the mother-tongue policy did not fail in 2024 — it failed long before it even started.

Across the country, from Lagos to Maiduguri, teachers, linguists and education experts all point to one truth: Nigeria launched a policy without preparing the system to carry it.

The policy was ambitious. It proposed that children from Early Childhood Education to Primary Six would learn in the language of their immediate community. Nevertheless, from the first day, the signs of trouble were everywhere. There were no textbooks in the local languages, no trained teachers, and in many cases, not even standardised spellings or grammar rules for hundreds of Nigerian languages. As one teacher in Mushin, Lagos, put it bluntly, “We were expected to teach in languages that do not even have enough words for basic science topics.”

In Lagos, where pupils come from mixed ethnic backgrounds, the policy collapsed immediately. Teachers reported classrooms where ten different languages were spoken. “How do you pick one mother tongue?” asked headmistress Olawunmi Ajayi. “Many of our children speak English at home. For them, English is already the mother tongue.”

Across the North, the problem was different but equally crippling. Associate Professor Olusegun Badaki of the University of Maiduguri noted that the government never provided structured training for teachers in major Nigerian languages. “The system simply assumed that every teacher could read and write fluently in the mother tongue. That is not true,” he said.

This lack of preparedness led to confusion in classrooms. In many schools, lessons alternated between English and the local language, depending on the teacher’s ability to manage the language switch. At Odi-Olowo Primary School in Lagos, Arithmetic was taught in English, while explanations were provided in Yoruba. In other schools, English dominated entirely because teachers were uncomfortable with the local language.

Beyond logistics, there was no clear budget, no political will, and no long-term plan. Parents resisted, teachers struggled, and school administrators improvised. At the heart of it all was a country with over 600 languages but no unified strategy.

So, when Minister of Education Dr Tunji Alausa announced that the policy had “destroyed education” in some regions, many experts countered that the real issue was not the policy itself — but the way it was hurried into existence.

Ultimately, Nigeria’s mother-tongue initiative did not fail in theory.
It failed in planning.
It failed in preparation.
Furthermore, most painfully, it failed the children it was meant to help.