Indigenous language orientation for effective citizenship education in 21st century Africa: reflections on the Nigerian experience

Abstract

Efforts geared towards effective knowledge production in most African states have suffered grave setbacks owing to their extreme reliance on foreign languages to mobilise the people for national development. Apparently, citizenship education does not take cognizance of the social realities and the low level of education in Africa, as the predominant use of foreign languages has excluded the majority of the African people, who use only their indigenous languages, from national development processes. Consequently, a gulf is created between the vision of the leadership and the aspirations/willpower of the populace. To redress this unwholesome trend in twenty-first-century Africa, this article calls for a pan-African orientation that prides itself on deploying African indigenous languages for mass mobilisation. Drawing on the Nigerian experience of propagating citizenship education, the paper appraises government sensitisation drives on issues such as the country’s re/branding project, political socialisation, safety practices of food/drug consumption and environmental sustainability. It is the contention of this paper that in order to bridge the knowledge gap between the elite and the unlettered, there should be an aggressive paradigm shift towards using indigenous African languages to mediate and negotiate government-citizenry transactions for the evolvement of the personally responsible, participatory and justiceoriented African citizen.