Mobilizing Indigenous Languages for Democracy in 1 : A Discursive and Sociolinguistic Critique DOI: 10.36108/NJSA/2102/01(0130) Benson Eluma Institut Français de Recherche en Afrique (IFRA) Institute of African Studies , Nigeria & Yinka Olarinmoye Department of Sociology Lagos State University Ojo, Lagos, Nigeria

Vol. 10 Issue 1, 2012

Abstract For democracy to become the political culture in Nigeria, the discourse of politics has to be conducted through expressive mechanisms owned by the people. In the absence of popular ownership of political language, the road to disconnect, apathy and disenfranchisement lies wide open. We take the view that the problem of politics is located squarely in the public sphere and that discourse is the activity that characterizes the public sphere. We raise the point that the sociolinguistic environment in the country does not encourage whole masses of Nigerians to talk politics in languages in which they can freely articulate their positions and present their aspirations. We posit that citizens are disenfranchised and rendered inaudible and invisible to the extent to which they cannot undertake political discourse with an appreciable measure of linguistic ease. The benefits of diversity are endangered as many people and entire groups in Nigeria lose the means of expressing their political views and opinions, let alone political projects and programmes. Invoking Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia, we make a blanket case for the viability of each and every extant language in Nigeria for political discourse if such usage is actively promoted among their respective communities of users.

Keywords: political discourse, linguistic landscape, disenfranchisement, minority languages, heteroglossia

Introduction The language question is one that the Nigerian polity cannot escape, especially in its ongoing throes of navigating a passage to a political culture of robust democratic governance. Nigeria stands at a critical juncture in its historical career, and political issues are at the heart of the myriads of problems confronting its populace in every aspect of their social life-world. This paper takes the view that the problem of politics is located squarely in the public

1 We thank the anonymous reviewers for this journal for comments that led to improvement in the structure of our essay and to the clarification of certain aspects of the issues raised in it. 50 The Nigerian Journal of Sociology and Anthropology Vol. 10 50 sphere. It posits that discourse is the activity that characterizes the public sphere. This is in light of how Habermas (1989) conceives of the ideal type of public sphere as the locus of a critical forum where citizens articulate their political positions without having to ingratiate themselves with state power by letting it manufacture their consent in political projects. The process of democratization, among other things, entails the creation of discursive mechanisms for cultivating and entrenching the desired political culture. Through their ownership and use of the language of such discursive mechanisms, ordinary citizens become committed to, and adept in, the debate about the central principles of governance and political participation. In the absence of this ownership, the road to popular disconnect, apathy and disenfranchisement lies wide open. This paper critiques the Nigerian case, which can be summarized as a sociolinguistic situation where a whole multitude of languages are retrenched from the arena of political discourse, in favour of a handful of languages which are, ironically, not being adequately propped up to be of much service to the entirety of the populace in discursively engaging issues in the polity. Beyond noting the farce of the political elite who hardly use the languages of the people when it comes to doing discourse in the public sphere, we argue that the Nigerian political system is undermined and impoverished by the general lack of attention to the discursive needs of the different language groups in the country, especially groups in the rural areas where any of the ‘big’ languages cannot boast of significant purchase among the people. The point we try to raise in this paper is that the sociolinguistic environment in the country does not encourage whole masses of Nigerians to talk politics in languages in which they can freely articulate their positions and present their aspirations. We advance that citizens are disenfranchised and rendered inaudible as well as invisible to the extent to which they cannot undertake political discourse with an appreciable measure of linguistic ease. The benefits of diversity are endangered as many people and entire groups in Nigeria lose the discursive means of expressing their political views and opinions, not to talk of articulating political projects and programmes. It is in consequence of this realization that an examination of the linguistic landscape of political discourse in the country becomes necessary, especially since the Nigerian state insists on projecting itself as committed to promoting democracy in Nigerian society.

From Theory to Practice: Political Language and the (In)Visible Language is implicated in the political process in more ways than one. In the literature on the concept of political culture, many scholars take for granted the central role played by 'language and the discourses attending social relations and power' in their conceptualization of politics, its principles and practices (Formisano, 2001: 395). In fact, they do so to such an extent as to warrant the objection by Formisano that such concentration on language, discourse and 'expressive mechanisms' 'comes at the expense of neglecting the material goals and consequences of power' (Formisano, 396). For instance, the cultural Mobilizing Indigenous Languages 51 51 historian, John Pocock, has made the argument that students of political culture should fasten their attention on how to utilize 'techniques for identifying and exploring the paradigmatic languages in which political discourse has been carried on' (Pocock, 1989: 35). According to theorists like Pocock, an analysis of the deep structure of political language, taken as the larger embodiment of all symbolic frames in the public sphere, lays bare the inner logic and motivation of political actors and institutions. Therefore, to dissect and interrogate the discursive practices of politics and political actors is to get down to the task of understanding any political situation at its most fundamental level. Hayakawa, for instance, gives us instances of how language is mobilized for political action both good and bad, and in the preface to Language in Thought and Action he indicates explicitly that the original version of the book was borne out of 'my conviction then, as it remains now, that we need to have a habitually critical attitude toward language—our own as well as that of others—both to provide for our personal well-being and to ensure that we function adequately as world citizens' (1990: ix). The examples of Nazi Germany and Hutu Power in Rwanda, where hate speech, in the midst of other factors, served as the galvanizer of murderous instincts carried over into political projects of mass slaughter, are eternally there to remind us of the terrible effects that can be wrought with language. And there are, of course, myriad examples of the cooption of language into projects of political emancipation and the empowerment of the oppressed. Even though we agree with Formisano that the 'material goals and consequences of power' must not be lost sight of for one minute in our reading of the political scene, we would like to emphasize that analysis of political language, of political discourse and rhetoric, goes beyond just looking at words. In this connection, we rely on the theoretical insight of Woodiwiss who postulates that 'improvements in our understanding of the nature of language have depended upon moving away from regarding words as a collection of pictures or representations of things and actions in the world and towards regarding them as part of a social apparatus for making things and actions visible or signifying them' (2001: 3). Much earlier, Tony Bennett arrived at the same conclusion in his observation that 'More recent developments in the theory of language have pulled in ... a direction ... stressing not only the independent materiality of the signifier—the "fleshiness" of the sign—but also the activity and effectivity of signification as a process which actively constructs cognitive worlds rather than simply passively reflecting a pre- existing reality' (1982: 287). This is an eminently Barthean perspective, for in the structuring of the elements of his semiological theory, Roland Barthes identifies language as the deepest layer of meaning-making 'where the sociological significance is more than superficial'. He goes on to proclaim thus: 52 The Nigerian Journal of Sociology and Anthropology Vol. 10 52

It is true that objects, images and patterns of behaviour can signify, and do so on a large scale, but never autonomously; every semiological system has its linguistic admixture. Where there is a visual substance, for example, the meaning is confirmed by being duplicated in a linguistic message... there is no meaning which is not designated, and the world of signifieds is none other than that of language. (Barthes, 1968: 10)

We posit that the political system is, inter alia, a linguistic system by means of which meaning is made of the theory and practice of both power and governance in a given society. Its signifieds are fully embodied in language. Specifically, they are embodied in the language used for articulating and indicating the elements, processes, principles and institutions of the political system. For the full sociological import of the political system to be within the grasp of the people, it seems evident that it has to be conducted in a language that is

always socialized, even at the individual level, for in speaking to somebody one always tries to speak more or less the other's language, especially as far as the vocabulary is concerned ("private property in the sphere of language does not exist").... (Ibid.: 21)

In every instance of its enactment, political language entails ‘speaking to somebody’, therefore, it must be shared language otherwise it falls short of being what it claims to be, and ends up as distortion if not deception. In the Nigerian context, the foremost linguist, Ayo Bamgbose, has stated the position in very clear terms more than twenty years ago. He submitted that:

The language question is important, and indeed urgent, because we have to define the scope of participation in government by the majority of Nigerians who are not fortunate enough to be literate, let alone literate in English. The on-going political debate is supposed to involve the grassroots, and it is encouraging to watch some debates on television in which Nigerian languages have been used to present the arguments. Unless we are paying lip-service to the concept of "participatory democracy", we must set out clearly what languages are to be used for government activities at the local, state and federal levels. Our unrealistic official language policy has hitherto meant the needless imposition of English in certain situations and the effective disenfranchisement of the masses. Consider, for instance, a familiarization tour of a state that takes a governor to some nooks and corners of the state. What is more natural than to see him address his people in their language? Quite often, this is the exception rather than the rule, for protocol demands Mobilizing Indigenous Languages 53 53

that he should speak English, even when he shares a language with the people. (Bamgbose, 1990: 73)

It is obvious that the above statement, taken in the context of what now obtains in the country's politics more than two decades after Professor Bamgbose committed it to writing, is worthy of full recapitulation. To give a demonstration of what can be laid bare by paying close attention to the 'paradigmatic language of political discourse', it is interesting to note that gender-wise, for instance, the country has not made much progress in terms of levelling the political playing field. Professor Bamgbose wrote at a time when Nigeria was under military rule and the governors were all from the military class, a class overly dominated by males. His choice of gender in the pronoun reflects the male bias of the military. Any given military governor in Nigeria's post-Independence political history was male, and Bamgbose spoke of his hypothetical governor as a 'he'. But are things any different under the current democratic dispensation? Cannot a linguist, aware of the stark realities of politics in the country today, defend the use of the male pronoun in referring to hypothetical state governors on the basis of the argument that they are always male? This paradigmatic language of political discourse, in which women are excluded from the lexicon and, indeed, from the visuality enabled by that lexicon, is deeply enshrined in the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, the supreme law of the land. For instance, consider the thick visualization of the male in Section 42(1) of the 1999 Nigerian Constitution:

A citizen of Nigeria of a particular community, ethnic group, place of origin, sex, religion or political opinion shall not, by reason only that he is such a person, be subjected to any form of discrimination.

Here it is seen that the Constitution envisages the citizen to be necessarily a 'he', a male, no matter what gestures its wording mimics towards inclusivity even in terms of sex. And this is supposed to be a democracy with a population of both males and females. As Luce Irigaray has told the world, 'democracy begins between two', it begins between woman and man, and the gendering of political discourse is a measure for gauging whether or not a society has come to terms with this imperative of the democratic order. Beyond theory, therefore, the political stakes are quite clear. Politics is the discursive formation par excellence in terms of Foucault's (1973, 1972) delineation of such formations. It is a site of power encompassing both ideology and praxis. And the paradigmatic language of political discourse makes certain things and actors visible while rendering other things and actors, other positions and possibilities, invisible and, indeed, disempowered. In Nigeria, we are confronted with a complex situation when we consider that the category of the disempowered in this connection includes entire language groups within which 54 The Nigerian Journal of Sociology and Anthropology Vol. 10 54 we may find further subtleties of disempowerment in relation such social categories as gender, class, age, education, etc.

The Political Disenchantment of Indigenous Languages That the enjoys pride of place in the sociolinguistic landscape in Nigeria cannot be gainsaid. And beyond its being accorded official status, it is a fact that English has become one of the languages of Nigeria, even though one is not sure what percentage of persons in the population feel comfortable using English for their daily business in both the private and public sphere. Most Nigerians are bilingual, and many speak more than two languages. Given the problems of society in Nigeria, especially the fallen standard of education, Nigerian bilinguals may suffer more from the three disadvantages of unenhanced bilingualism listed by Christophersen (1948: 10), namely, 'the danger of a split personality', 'the greater mental effort required in handling two linguistic media', and 'the risk of considerably reduced efficiency in both languages'. Chinua Achebe famously argued that Nigeria's national literature 'is the literature written in English', and he enumerated some of 'the factors which have conspired to place English in the position of national language in many parts of Africa' (1965: 27, 28). Even though Achebe was addressing what he saw as the stark sociolinguistic reality in postcolonial Africa, he could not have envisaged the current scenario where people's lack of access to formal education has made it impossible for English to truly become a national language in Nigeria. English is more or less the argot of the educated elite; it is the language with which the elite have disenfranchised other stakeholders in the 'Nigeria project', making it impossible for them to give voice to their ideas and positions. In political debates and in the discourse of the political system both in general and specific contexts, there is an evident increase in the use of English by Nigeria's political elite, even when they address themselves to people from the same locality as themselves (sometimes interpreters are employed to relay the message, thereby emphasizing the absence of a linguistic common ground between leader and led at the grassroots). This show-off habit of using English represents a privatization of what ought to be public property—the very thing that Barthes and Bamgbose warned us against doing. The situation is such that many Nigerians deeply desire to acquire proficiency in English, and 'as Goke-Pariola (1993) reports, Nigerians in many parts of the country, contested the use of indigenous languages in the schools because it was perceived as denying them the linguistic capital necessary for the accumulation of both economic and political powers' (cited in Bhatt, 2001: 533). No language is more powerful than the spheres in which it is utilized for discourse. Indeed, one can claim that languages are captives of these discursive spheres as well as being constitutive of them. If English has become the language of power and privilege in Nigeria, it is not because its overall grammatical apparatus is richer than that of each of the more than five hundred Mobilizing Indigenous Languages 55 55 languages spoken in the country.2 Take, for instance, a language such as Yoruba whose grammar disallows the gender bias often encountered in English in the way the latter marks the singular personal pronouns, with 'he' being the privileged pronoun, thus making the male quite visible in the prism of the social imaginary. When we translate the section of the Nigerian Constitution quoted above into Yoruba, the privileged male disappears and the image of the citizen made visible or signified is simply that of the human being—neither male nor female nor neutered, just the human person as citizen.

Òmó orílè-èdè yìí kankan, akọ tàbi abo,3 yálà nípà èyà, ìbí, èsìn ati ọrọ òṣèlú, ko gbódó jé iya kankan nípà éléya-méyá ni ilé Naijíría.

Yet a language like Yoruba is not as powerful as English in Nigeria despite its apparent natural advantages in this particular regard. Of course, we are not suggesting that Yoruba becomes the national language of constitution drafting. The more important matter is to highlight its fittedness for political discourse and to show that there are instances where it does easefully what English may have to bend over backwards to do with such constructions as 'Any citizen shall have full guarantee of their human rights',4 a construction in which the plural form of the third person is used to overcome the problem of gender bias. Any number of Nigerian languages can do this work of gender neutrality with as much ease as Yoruba does it. We are not, however, repeating the error of Oyeronke Oyewumi (1997) who jumps from this linguistic evidence to conclude that traditional Yoruba society did not have any form of the gender

2 See 'Languages of Nigeria', www.ethnologue.com/show_country.asp?name=Nigeria. 3 We are grateful to Dr A.S. Ajala of the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Ibadan, for supplying us with this translation. Dr Ajala's translation, given on the spot and without his initially being aware of the point raised in this paper pertaining to gender in the , did not refer to 'sex' by means of such a phrase as 'akọ tàbi abo' or 'okùnrin tàbi obìnrin' (i.e. male or female). According to him, such distinctions are superfluous in a language that does not have gendered anaphora and cataphora, a language in which there is no word for 'sex' or 'gender'; and in any case, 'Òmó orílè-èdè yìí kankan' is inclusive of all citizens regardless of sex. But then too, since gendered politics is a reality of our times, we believe that, for the sake of emphasis, the expression 'akọ tàbi abo' has a place in a Yoruba translation of this section of the Constitution, and so we have added it. There must be no mistake: women are citizens as much as men. We remain grateful to Dr Ajala with whom we had a very lively discussion on this issue; and also to the linguist, Kola Tubosun, of the Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville, for clarification on certain details. 4 Other such constructions in English for ensuring gender neutrality include 'he or she', 's/he' and even the facetious 's/h/it'. 56 The Nigerian Journal of Sociology and Anthropology Vol. 10 56 concept in the organization of its social world. Rather, we respect the caution framed thus by Marcel Mauss:

For instance: there are few civilizations where the division of labor between the two sexes and the apportionment of things among them which is parallel to it, the distinction between "male" and "female", is more dominant, more conscious, more tyrannical than among the Polynesians or among the Chinese. It regulates occupations, and rites, and laws, and theology, and divination, and aesthetics. Now, it is not expressed in the languages of these civilizations, which, so to speak, do not know the distinctions of gender. (Mauss, 1964: 125)

We agree with Mauss that there is not always a one-to-one correlation between 'the categories of language' and the 'categories of collective thought'. Yet, as Mauss notes in the same place, 'the division into masculine and feminine genders has, in certain cases, a close correspondence with quite definite social phenomena' (126). We assert that this correspondence is definitely at work between the language of the Nigerian Constitution and the realities of political participation in the country. It is also self-evident that languages get impoverished when they are excluded from participation in certain fields of discourse. A language and, indeed, its speakers become disempowered when the language does not play a role in the discourse of power and governance. It is this process of discursive disempowerment that has increasingly come to mark the sociolinguistic landscape of politics in Nigeria. And it is not as if the broad mass of the people are being prepared to engage in serious political talk by means of the English language. The literacy rate, put at 42%-51%, does not tell us much about relative literacy in the hundreds of languages spoken in the country. Such is the nature of things in this connection that many people instinctually think of the literacy rate as an index of what people can only do with English, forgetting that a person who is very literate in English can be a total illiterate in Chibok or Ejagham, etc., and that these latter languages had been used for the discourse of governance and power and for participation in the political process long before the days when the British came to organize the different Nigerian peoples for domination under colonialism. In point of fact, there was such a time in the precolonial past when English coexisted with the other languages of Nigerian peoples without displacing these languages from the political arena. Hope Waddell, who arrived in the Calabar area in the first half of the nineteenth century, is said to have 'found very intelligent journals of the affairs of this country kept by its rulers, written in English, of so old a date as 1767' (Ajayi, 1965: 89-90). For another example, it is a known fact that the correspondence between Nigerian potentates and their foreign partners in the Atlantic Slave Trade was, in the main, conducted in English (see Ojo, 2008). That such journals and correspondence were done in the English language did not mean that the internal affairs of state were Mobilizing Indigenous Languages 57 57 conducted in the same language. Rather the indigenous languages were used for internal political discourse and people did not feel cut off from ownership of the language of power in their societies. Now to make matters explicit, it is not only English that has become a language of dominance in the Nigerian polity, pushing other languages out of the political scene. Speakers of the Wazobia triumvirate feel privileged in the polity because all other groups seem to be defined in terms of their geographical, not merely linguistic, contiguity to Yoruba, Hausa, or Igbo, as 5 though to be a Nigerian one has to claim affinity with any of the Big Three. This myth of a tripartite Nigeria is lent credence by the illusion of a natural division of the country into three regions by the Niger and Benue rivers. And as Igboanusi and Ohia have noted, 'For some obvious political and demographic factors, indigenous language development in Nigeria favours the [three] major languages' (2001: 126). It is true that speakers of these three languages make up about half the population of Nigeria. But it is equally true that many people who speak the three major languages are people from ethnic groups with a minority language, a point that is easily observed in the case of many speakers of Yoruba and Hausa. Sadly enough, given the facts of the political situation, these people who speak one or more of the major languages in addition to their own minority languages cannot lay claims to being of Igbo, Yoruba or Hausa ethnicity when it comes to brass tacks. Thus they may not be able to reap the full political dividends of being speakers of the major languages. Close to 99% of the extant 5146 Nigerian languages are politically disenchanted from the centre, even though they may still be employed for discourse at the level of traditional political structures. Whatever the government's interest in throwing open the space of political articulation entails, we strongly doubt if anybody believes it is focused on these minority languages. The situation is made much worse for people living in rural areas where only these minority languages are spoken. We can easily submit that when one's language is not the language of political discourse, one is not only disenchanted, but is left to seek refuge in apathy. Users of Nigeria's minority languages are in a quandary that is not of their own making. In the case of some of these minority languages, their users have made efforts to bring awareness of them to the centre, and there is some degree of rescue and rehabilitation work being done in order to fit them for use in the discourse on the experience of democracy in the country. But really the work to be done is not one where isolated human agency is enough to turn things around. 'A

5 Prof Alexander Iwara (2008: 39-42) recounts the story of how the Wazobia languages were elevated to the status of national languages in 1978 to quell their 'subterranean, but politically explosive rivalry'. 6 See 'Languages of Nigeria', www.ethnologue.com/show_country.asp?name=Nigeria. 58 The Nigerian Journal of Sociology and Anthropology Vol. 10 58 linguistic revival... could not possibly be carried out by a single individual' (Nahir, 1998: 336). Nahir's article is on the 'Hebrew Revival', and he notes there that 'The revival was the collective effort of a group..., i.e. the teachers in the rural schools of Palestine'. One has to think of the conditions of possibility that enable or disable these revival projects. As Egbokhare (2001: 105) argues:

The power position of a people and consequently their language is sometimes not under conscious control but is determined by subtle socio-political and historical factors. The profile of a language may improve positively if it becomes associated with a thriving culture, religion, trade, science and technology and education, or if it is associated with a dominant political and economic power. On the contrary ecological disasters, conquest, migration, urbanisation, conflicts and prejudices may impact negatively on a people and their language.

A cursory examination of the Nigerian scene leaves us in despair as to the fortune of the minority languages and their speakers in the Nigerian polity. They are being driven into the margins of the polity by virtue of the fact that they do not own a language with which to make contributions to the national political discourse. And it is not as if at the grassroots, as noted by Bamgbose, these minority languages finally get mobilized for political articulation. For instance, work, albeit haphazard, is being done to translate the Constitution into Yoruba. But has there ever been news of translating certain portions, if not all of the Constitution, into the Akokoid languages whose speakers are neighbours of the Yoruba? The implicit thinking seems to be that Yoruba will suffice for all the languages in the Defoid group—and that is that. In Kaduna State, there is definitely no project to translate the Constitution into such minority languages as Achipa, Amo, Ashe, Atsam, Bachama, Kamuku, Chori, Doka, Eten, etc. And Kaduna is not the state with the greatest linguistic diversity in the federation. The old argument might be raised that these are rather 'small' languages, and that the cost-effective thing to do is to focus on Hausa, which, in any case, virtually everybody in the north speaks. This argument is valid, but only to an extent—or as Spivak says of something very similar, the argument is 'correct but irrelevant', and she adds that the 'only principled answer' to the charge that it is 'inconvenient and impractical' to attend to the situation of minority languages is: 'Too bad' (2003: 10). As has been said, the major languages do not constitute an absolute majority in terms of their contribution to the population of Nigeria. What is more, minority people who speak, say, Hausa are not considered as Hausa in the Nigerian realpolitik, a scenario that replays itself with the two other major languages. Moreover, is it not time we began to think of how to make the field truly level for all players, especially for players from minority rural areas? What kind of equity is being sought when language planners rail against the ascendancy of English but do not find anything to Mobilizing Indigenous Languages 59 59 denounce in the complete deprivation of minority languages to the glory of the Wazobia triumvirate? In terms of sheer numbers, (NP) trumps the Big Three and (NE).7 Yet we do not see it being promoted by government at all levels in the country. This mistreatment of the language8 has been noted by many scholars. Egbokhare (2001:111-112) states that:

There is a policy dimension to the negative attitude towards NP. Faraclas (1996) notes that "despite the fact that NP is the most logical choice for a national language it has received little recognition from those responsible for language policy in Nigeria". Official attitude towards NP remains negative. NP is not recognised in the National Policy on Education. It is not employed as a medium of instruction, neither is it taught as a subject in spite of the fact that the 1991 NPE states that in the first few years of their education, children should be taught in their mother tongue or the language of their environment.... The exclusion of NP in the NPE is indefensible. It is a clear violation of the linguistic rights of the speakers of the language; their right to literacy, information, freedom of expression, as well as their right to participate in the process of governance.

Might this disregard be in consequence of NP being largely 'owned'9 by people from minority parts of the country? Indeed, until recent times when the culture industry, especially Nollywood and Nigerian hip-hop, has been lending

7 Egbokhare (2001) submits that there are more NP speakers than the combined population of people who speak Hausa and Yoruba. 8 NP is recognized by Nigerian linguists as a language in its own right. See Elugbe and Omamor (1991). In point of fact, a group of West African linguists have formed a Nigerian Pidgin research network, known as Naija Langwej Akedemi (NLA) with Prof Francis Egbokhare as its president, to study NP in toto, describe its grammar, compile its lexicon, develop a standard orthography for it, and advance its use across the sub- region. What is more, they have rechristened NP as Naija, strongly suggesting that it is now a language and not a pidgin form. 9 Our use of 'owned' here should not suggest that NP, a very hybrid language that displays a high capacity to take from and give back to other languages, belongs to any particular Nigerian group. We only mean to acknowledge the fact that NP has been creolized in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria, where a great many people, cutting across a range of ethnic groups, now speak it as their L1, or as an L1 among other L1s. Christophersen (1948: 2) reasons that 'Strictly speaking, it is nonsense to say that a person has "two mother tongues" - unless, of course, his mother herself has two languages', a phenomenon not at all uncommon in many parts of Nigeria, especially among the minorities. The symbiosis between NP and the other languages spoken in the Niger Delta region deserves explication in a much fuller way than can be done in a paper of this sort. 60 The Nigerian Journal of Sociology and Anthropology Vol. 10 60 the language the veneer of celebrity, NP was the most denigrated language in the country, stigmatized by schoolteachers not just as vernacular but as the speech of people without culture. But notwithstanding this sociolinguistic persecution, NP has never lost its capacity to engage the discursive terrain of power and political participation in the country. As Faraclas puts it, 'for an understanding of Nigerian affairs and for practical communication in Nigeria, a knowledge of Nigerian Pidgin is fast becoming indispensable' (cited in Egbokhare, 112). NP has always stood up to, and kept abreast of, Nigerian English (NE), the argot of the country's political elite. Again Egbokhare captures the situation quite instructively:

In the past, Pidgin in the mass media was reserved for jokes, humour cartoons, etc. In literature, it was associated with a low or inferior social position. This has changed significantly as it is now employed to convey important information, for poetry, news dissemination, public enlightenment, propaganda, etc. In the print media, newspaper articles, cartoons and humorous pieces are written in NP.... The increasing profile of NP is demonstrated by its increasing use as a language of public enlightenment and mass mobilization. According to Iroko (1989: 39), "it would seem that the government has suddenly realized (that NP) is a powerful language of communication that cuts across a wider audience than any other Nigerian language". Government now insists that most of their messages be sent in NP. Thus NP has become the primary language of health campaigns. (Egbokhare, 2001: 113-114)

But in point of fact, NP achieved its ascendancy without support from government; its success among the people is what has forced the government to notice it as a language to be reckoned with. And NP has been, for all purposes and intents, the most prolific language used in the Nigerian public sphere to interrogate power, as exampled in the oeuvre and activism of the Afrobeat maestro, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti. In all seriousness, it can be said that the most powerful and resonant sociological appraisal of democracy in Nigeria has been rendered in NP in Fela's song 'Teacher Don't Teach Me Nonsense' where the musician speaks of the Nigerian experience of democracy as 'demonstration of craze, crazy demonstration'. In an illuminating passage, Sola Olorunyomi (2005) explains that:

The choice of a language of communication has always coincided with Fela's perception of who his primary audience is and, even here, we find convergence with the three broad Fanonean stages he underwent. He sang mainly in English in that phase of his high modernist mode of African-American jazz tradition...; in Yorùbá during the reactive ethno-nationalist phase (having experienced racism in the West); and pidgin, once Pan-Africanism became his Mobilizing Indigenous Languages 61 61

main ideological focus, and the need to cultivate disciples to this creed.

His version of Pidgin English strove towards the Midwest variant spoken in the Sapele-Warri areas of Delta State in Nigeria— generally regarded as the Standard Nigerian Pidgin.... The convenience of this variant for other users of the form, in the vortex of a politically charged language situation like Nigeria's, cannot be divorced from its emergence among minority nationalities. Its cultural dominance over politically dominating larger language groups such as Igbo, Hausa and Yorùbá poly-nationalities is not new in history. A most ready example is the cultural incorporation of Fulfude by Hausa language in spite of the fact that Fulfude was the language of the conquering Fulani nationality after the 1804 jihad in northern Nigeria. (Olorunyomi, 2005: 68)

No matter the spectacular example of an artist-activist like Fela, it is obvious that the ascendancy of NP is not an achievement to be credited to isolated individuals making their own linguistic choices. The linguistic community of NP in Nigeria today precedes any individual who may choose to use the language for particular ends. Indeed, 'It was in this sense that the structuralists insisted that, though speech and individual speech-acts may be individual matters, the language system... was a social system...' (Hall, 1982: 72). The widespread use of NP is nothing short of a popular movement, though not conscious of itself as a movement as such but quite driven by the inexorable human exigency of devising and possessing a paradigm of discourse, a medium of articulation in a society where the elite are happy to leave the people in a condition of inarticulacy in the public sphere. The current disenchantment with democracy in Nigeria must be confronted with paradigmatic languages of discourse that are truly owned by the people if this country is to find the way out of the present darkness. Again, we are not saying that NP is the language that will give the broad mass of people in Nigeria their deserved voice in the public sphere. One language alone cannot serve the purpose of diverse peoples, and there are places in Nigeria where NP has not penetrated. Rather, we cite the example of NP's trumping of English and the Big Three to argue that every language is capable of such politically explicit discourse. It all depends on a number of factors, including how vigorously the language in question is employed by its speakers, as well as the vigilance they observe in ensuring that their language is not excluded from any realm of discourse, in that the likely outcome of such exclusion may not be just the linguistic one of the impoverishment of their language—or its eventual extinction—but, indeed, the implications of not being able to throw in a word in political discourse, let alone articulate and hold a position in governance. In 62 The Nigerian Journal of Sociology and Anthropology Vol. 10 62 this regard, the conditions of possibility mapped out by Egbokhare in relation to the 'power position of a people and their language' have to be taken into serious consideration.

The Eroded Field of Political Discourse What we have attempted to show in the preceding sections is that language pervades the praxis of power and governance. It is a complex reality, and in order to mobilize language in the democratic process in Nigeria plenty of attention has to be paid to the roles language plays vis-à-vis such factors and domains in the polity as gender, class, age, interethnic relations, education, science and technology, cultural production, industry, etc., etc. Nigeria's diversity cuts across several realms. As matters lie in the country, what is not being aimed for is deliberative or discursive democracy, whereas that mode of democracy is the very thing that fits the multiethnic and multilingual nature of the Nigerian federation. There is a shrinking, an erosion, of the field of political discourse, limited to operations carried out through expressive mechanisms that utilize only a handful of languages among a vast multitude. But 'The more the merrier', goes the popular saying, and, as Dryzek (2005: 223) remarks, 'In this light, a conception of discursive democracy that is home to a constellation of discourses can be brought to bear'. It is not enough to insist that the Constitution be translated into other languages than English and the Wazobia triumvirate, or that the business of the legislative houses be conducted in these languages. The example of NP shows that even though the language is not being used in the two domains mentioned above, there is a vibrant community of speakers who wield it for dissecting and coming to terms with the principles and practices of power and governance. The presence or absence of a community of users devoted to bringing their language into the arena of power talk is decisive in this connection. For all the mobilization that English and the Big Wazobia Three enjoy, we may still argue that the paradigm of these languages used in power talk is in each case not a variant familiar to the broad mass of their respective speakers in Nigeria. In the first place, how many Nigerians have read the Constitution in English and can interpret its legalese? In the case of, say, Yoruba, the creativity of newscasters and presenters on radio and TV stations most times sounds idiolectal. It will take much more frequency and spread of use beyond the studio of media houses for these idiolects of Yoruba to coalesce into a standard paradigmatic language of political discourse readily accessible to common speakers of the language without their having to make all sorts of demands on their ability to get at the meaning behind the metaphors of infinitely innovative newscasters and journalists. In matters of language use, things can hardly be forced by the activism and example of individual actors unless there is a much more concerted effort to make a change that is social, and not just professional. And in situations marked by rampant bilingualism or, indeed, trilingualism and other such linguistic multiples, there is the huge chance that diglossia may occur, one Mobilizing Indigenous Languages 63 63 language variant becoming the language of public realm discourse, while other variants are retained for discourse in other domains, domestic, religious, etc. Christophersen (1948: 2, 4) tries to make clear the difficulties faced by a bilingual person, difficulties that, perhaps, are multiplied for people who speak more than two languages:

Most unilingual people are not conscious of any effort when speaking their native tongue, and assume that for the bilingual it is the same with his two languages. To some extent this is true—but only up to a point: bilingualism does undoubtedly require a greater mental effort than unilingualism, and the bilingual person is more conscious of his two languages than the unilingual person is of his. Keeping up two languages can sometimes be a strain, even if one has known them both from childhood, and two languages are as much as most people can handle. A few specially favoured individuals may be able to handle three languages perfectly: I do not believe that anybody can do more than that.

...[I]t is possible, and even probable, that one of the two languages will be somewhat stronger, somewhat more familiar, than the other. This is often the case with bilingual persons, and yet the name "bilingual" is the best we have... Often one language is more closely associated with certain aspects of the person's intellectual or emotional life. A bilingual person once confessed: "I count in Dutch and make love in English."

One may want to argue that this is not the case with bilinguals in Nigeria, that they feel equally at home in any combination of languages at their command. But the truth of the matter, it appears, is that those Nigerian bilinguals who are at ease in any of their languages are people who have the fortune of being able to use these languages across a wide range of discursive domains, people who are empowered at the same time to be literate in the several languages they speak. They are the privileged ones, and their privilege is largely a function of their social life chances. Here the exception proves the rule. Language is a sociological phenomenon, no matter the location of the language faculty by innatists like Chomsky (1971: 123) in a species-specific Language Acquisition Device (LAD) with which we are all born as human beings. For language to come into full manifestation, it has to be deployed in realms that integrate the individual into a full-blown linguistic community. As it is, many Nigerian languages are not at the moment capable of being deployed in the discourse of politics and governance under the present democratic dispensation, and this is a sociological problem of usage, not any result of pathology in the LAD of the speakers of these languages. It is a 64 The Nigerian Journal of Sociology and Anthropology Vol. 10 64 situation of deprivation primarily caused by the Nigerian state's retrenchment of these languages in favour of English and the Wazobia triumvirate, notwithstanding the lip-service paid by successive administrations to the need to promote instruction in the mother tongues in the early years of the primary level of education. When indigenous languages are used in the legislative assemblies, it is really the legislators that are being empowered in the use of these languages, not the people. As was said in the case of the revival of Hebrew as a language used by Jewish people in all domains of discourse in the city of Tel Aviv, 'Even the dogs in the street bark in Hebrew' (Helman, 2002). To look at the present condition of Nigerian languages in terms of the ethnography of speaking, Hymes's dictum applies: 'One starts with a social group and considers all the linguistic varieties present in it' (1972: 54). The question, therefore, is: Do we find in each Nigerian language a variety of usage that is fitted for the discourse of the principles, processes and issues of governance under the current democratic dispensation? This is not meant as a rhetorical question, for the answers we provide in the case of each language is key to knowing whether that language can fulfill the function of communicating democracy as political culture among its users. Furthermore, when we find in a given language a variety of usage which focuses on the discourse of power and governance, we must be vigilant to know who has control and command of that variety of usage: the people, the politicians or news-casters? In this regard, Dryzek provides a definitional device that goes straight to the heart of the matter: 'A discourse can be understood as a shared way of making sense of the world embedded in language' (2005: 223). When the people do not share in the language of political discourse, then we can safely conclude that they do not inhabit the same political world as the elite who run the political directorate of their society. It is in such contexts as this that language begins to lose its nature of being 'a two-sided act... determined equally by whose word it is and for whom it is meant' (Volosinov, 1973: 86). This lacuna in the linguistic repertoire of a great many of the languages spoken in Nigeria indicates the disenfranchisement of their speakers, rendered inaudible and invisible under a dispensation that is ostensibly democratic. Iwara (2008) has reached a similar conclusion on the prospects of the discourse of sustainable development in Nigeria, given the linguistic situation in the country:

We showed that language was a key factor in the thinking process, and that in a situation where the people could neither think in English because they have limited access to it or (sic) in their own languages because they were not developed sufficiently to deal with modern development, there was no way sustainable development could be achieved. The people simply did not have a "place to stand" to "move the earth". (Iwara, 2008:53) Mobilizing Indigenous Languages 65 65

In terms of the discourse of power and governance, Nigerians are disenfranchised to the extent to which the discourse of governance is not made available in their languages as well as to the extent to which they cannot articulate a position in any of the languages—English, Wazobia, NP, etc.— used for engaging discourse in the public sphere beyond the level of the village. And for all we know, their villages may well be some of the places where the prebendal, nay predatory,10 Nigerian state extracts much of the revenue with which it shores up its power and keeps the rest of the country under the sway of its uneven financial largesse. This is a situation that is, on the whole, quite symptomatic of the kind of democracy practised in the country—a democracy in which the electorate are made to forfeit their right of deliberation to an elected few and their appointee hangers-on in the political directorate through the ritual of pressing inked thumbs on ballot papers every four years in elections that are ultimately of questionable integrity.

Are there discursive conclusions? We have tried to paint the picture of the sociolinguistic landscape of political discourse in Nigeria as starkly as we can in a short space, and to point out how the promotion or retrenchment of any language implicates social processes of political (non)participation and even political (in)visibility. Perhaps we have not been able to spell out the options that are available beyond attempting to make a blanket case for the viability of every Nigerian language for political discourse. However, there are pragmatic options even in situations of contest where the need for political articulation may override the desire to build ethno- political formations intact with their respective linguistic apparatus. In consideration of these options, it has been highlighted in the literature, for instance, that

[One] mode of ethnolinguistic mobilization is, paradoxically, the use of the dominant language by ethnic groups to voice their demands and rally support: for instance, nationalist elites in India effectively used English in their struggle for independence, while Amerindians in the USA have found English a powerful lingua franca for expressing their ethnic identity. (Hamers and Blanc, 1989: 161)

But other options are available beyond appropriating the dominant linguistic artillery and turning it on those who hitherto wielded it for purposes of domination and disempowerment. Some of the proposals in this regard involve a spirit of give-and-take as well as a willingness to protect the rights of linguistic minorities. In some situations, the speakers of minority languages may become better advantaged in the calculus if their languages are guaranteed

10 See Peter Lewis, 1996. 66 The Nigerian Journal of Sociology and Anthropology Vol. 10 66 protection and promotion and if they are at the same time equipped to acquire the dominant language(s) of their choice. As Harris and Reilly observe:

People can speak several languages, and several languages can coexist. Specific arrangements differ from case to case, but all involve a two-track policy whereby one track gives space and guarantees for minority languages, and the other track promotes the learning of one or several state languages to allow communication and enhance mutual understanding. (Harris and Reilly,1998: 246)

However, we are hard put to cite examples of where this kind of blissful arrangement has been effectively worked out. The Nigerian state seemed to have had such an intention, for instance, in the proposal, made into a National Policy on Education in 1991, that mother tongues be exclusively used in the early years of education. However, that policy never really got off the paper on which it was set down. One doubts if it is even possible to teach all aspects of the different subject areas in the Nigerian languages which lack agreed pedagogical registers for technical terms and concepts. Perhaps this is why we are compelled to promote each and every one of the languages spoken in Nigeria until such a time when their respective communities of users begin to actively do the work of bringing their languages to life in different social realms. It may seem like the promotion of chaos in a pullulating landscape of more than 500 languages, but we find succour in Bakhtin’s advancement of heteroglossia as the healthy condition of living languages:

Every concrete utterance of a speaking subject serves as a point where centrifugal as well as centripetal forces are brought to bear. The processes of centralization and decentralization, of unification and disunification, intersect in the utterance; the utterance not only answers the requirements of its own language as an individualized embodiment of a speech act, but it answers the requirements of heteroglossia as well; it is in fact an active participation in such speech diversity. And this active participation of every utterance in living heteroglossia determines the linguistic profile and style of the utterance to no less a degree than its inclusion in any normative- centralizing system of a unitary language. (Bakhtin, 1981: 272)

We have so far tried to argue that the erosion of discourse can render whole bodies of people inaudible as well as invisible in the political arena. We make the claim that there is such a thing as the 'politics of language' (Harris and Reilly, 1998: 244). In the 'palaver' system of many traditional African societies, discourse and deliberation were open to a large number of people, and it is true what Young has argued, namely, that 'there seems little evidence of systematic African reflection on the value and potentialities of indigenous political resources and practices' (1993: 301). The 'palaver', an institution of Mobilizing Indigenous Languages 67 67 politics that incorporates diverse voices from the polity into the process of deliberation and decision making, can serve as a historical corrective to the current crisis of democracy in Nigeria. We are not advocating a throwback to the past in this day and age when the polis has grown overlarge and citizens cannot all be gathered together in the agora or village square, but lessons can be learnt and adaptations are possible. Owusu (1997: 137) writes about how the kgotla, a variation on the palaver, has been incorporated into the 'successful adaptation of traditional political institutions to multi-party democracy in Botswana'. Such adaptations would involve plenty of devolution of governance to levels other than the federal and state centres, to places where the discourse of governance has, in effect, been abrogated under the prevailing political structure. To achieve the benefits of palaver, of political talk in which the language is owned and spoken by the people, it is better to look inwards and not just outwards at what has happened in Europe and the US—but, of course, we can and must learn from others. Markoff (1999: 689) maintains that:

The history of democracy is profoundly polycentric, and an exclusive or even disproportionate focus on the world's centers of wealth and power will miss much. The history of democracy also shows that democracy is a moving target, not a static structure. Democracy is a juxtaposition of institutions and practices with quite different histories.

We maintain that for democracy to be polycentric in Nigeria, for it to become a commonplace of daily narrative among people everywhere in the country, its discourse would have to be made available in the languages of the different groups in the country through a forum like the age-old deliberative institution of the palaver.11 It is an ideal that is worth pursuing, while we remain aware of the fact that it is in the nature of things that some languages should become extinct. But before that day, people need to have a voice in the arena of power talk today. When such talk catches fire among citizens at the grassroots, they will be compelled to revisit not just the vocabulary of power at that level but also reappraise the very concepts, charters and myths underlying

11 We have to point out that in Nigeria attempts are always being made by politicians to mimic the palaver, to create a simulacrum of it in populist forums that never get institutionalized in ways that involve the devolution of power to people at the grassroots. One example, in this regard, is the Jama’a Forum inaugurated by Mu’azu Babangida Aliyu, present governor of Niger State, where every quarter of the year he gets to meet with people from a particular district in the state. Whatever his intentions, Governor Aliyu’s initiative remains a parody of the palaver because the Jama’a Forum will most likely vanish from the scene when he departs from office. 68 The Nigerian Journal of Sociology and Anthropology Vol. 10 68 systems of power relations within their immediate communities. And rather than waiting for the discursive trickle down of the dividends of democracy from the centre via, say, projects to translate the Constitution into this or that indigenous language, the welcome reverse would be a constant upsurge of ideas from below. The multiple inflections that such diversity of discourse may contribute to politics at the centre will constantly renew and invigorate the practices and principles of democracy in the country as a whole. The politics of language in Nigeria is such that many speakers of minority languages have now acquired one or more of the paradigmatic languages of political discourse in the country. They do this so they can partake in politics at the centre. Bamgbose (1990: 75) cites one example of how the politics of language plays out among some speakers of minority languages in the country: 'They are aware that none of their languages is likely to be chosen as the national language, so they opt for English as a way of avoiding being subjected to the "imposition" of one or the other of the three major languages.' As this choice is replicated a million fold, it is clear that none of the Wazobia and minority languages in Nigeria can retain a position as the language of power and governance.12 This is evidenced in the fact that as far as political discourse is concerned in Nigeria today, it is English all the way, with NP serving as the most powerful language of the counter-discourse outside the corridors and conclaves of power. Vast numbers of people in Nigeria, speakers of Wazobia and minority languages alike, are thus disallowed from making meaningful contributions in the public sphere owing to their linguistic disadvantage, and are thereby faded out into the margins of the political scene. In the final analysis, one aspect of Orwell's views on the decline of language looms rather large in the sociolinguistic scenario we are concerned with here:

Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can be a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. (1991: 77)

As has been said, this vicious circle of the conversion of causes into effects and effects into even more powerful causes with much more intensified effects ad infinitum is quite noticeable in the impoverishment of virtually all the languages of Nigeria. And it bears reiteration to state that English has not become a language in which the broad mass of the people are acquiring

12 Iwara (2008: 40) insists that the elevation of the Wazobia languages to the status of national languages in 1978 'was a clever move that killed off the individual ambition of the three languages by appearing to give support to all of them together against the dominance of their foreign rival [English]'. Mobilizing Indigenous Languages 69 69 educated proficiency. In the general context of a falling standard of education, the poor performance rates13 recorded in the subject in school certificate examinations belie whatever triumphalism English may enjoy on the platform of the discourse of power. On this note, we can conclude that linguistic decline in the Nigerian polity is both widespread and broad-based. What we are witnessing are the worst manifestations of unenhanced bilingualism as people become increasingly inarticulate in the public sphere in both their native and adopted languages. Being able to speak the language of power is a desideratum for which people are willing to sacrifice a lot of things. But perhaps we can avoid the sacrifice of other desirables and avail ourselves of the benefits of multiplicity by invoking the Bakhtinian concept of the dialogic imagination, of heteroglossia and polyvocality, in the sociolinguistics of politics in Nigeria, and thereby mobilize the languages of the people to the end of ensuring a true government of the people. Bakhtin's alter ego, V.N. Volosinov, long ago proclaimed that 'speech is an essential ingredient in all ideological production' (1973: 15). This speech has to be in the mouths of ordinary citizens if democracy is to be entrenched as the political culture in Nigeria.

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