For instance, I bet the ministry of Statistics has no evidence to show the number of houses in the country, number of cars on our roads. Students in school and out of school... I could go on, we just don't keep records effectively, but that is not the issue to be discussed today.

The language policies acknowledge three languages, Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba as the major Nigerian languages.

We understand that language not only aids communication, it gives a group of people some sense of belonging, identity, culture.

Anyway, we will just accept that we have approximately 500 spoken languages. The other day, I was discussing the situation of the Nigerian language with a colleague.

Somehow, the majority of educated Nigerian parents have raised only monolingual children.

What I mean is that most of our children only speak English. This is an issue of concern that we don't seem to be concerned about!

What makes it sad is that we think we have raised a class of "educated" westerners, meanwhile the West is raising bilingual children! What an irony!

Obviously, the English language is very important in our context. If we only had those 500 languages, how would we communicate with each other?

We will have another 'Tower of Babel' experience in our hands. So The English language acts as a unifying language, but should it be at the expense of our indigenous languages?

Interestingly we have policies that have been enacted and re-enacted, to prevent the extinction of our languages, but enactment will not immediately translate to implementation.

According to our policy, the first three years of primary education, a child should be instructed in the mother tongue while the English language is a taught as a subject language. Imagine that!

Which school in our beloved country practices this? I don't even know of any. And can you blame us? We know that in the global world, the English language is more important for networking than Ibo, Hausa or Yoruba for instance, so the fear that we do not want our children to miss out on this 'once in a lifetime opportunity' encourages us to help them learn how to communicate in the English Language before they can crawl!

We were raised to speak our languages and we still have a strong grasp of the English vocabulary, don't we think we might have deprived our children of this opportunity?

How do you explain an individual with a Yoruba name, who speaks only the English Language and an English lad, who speaks the English language and Mandarin?

The English lad can speak his language and another language?

What have we done? What are doing? Do we know the implications of this situation? This reminds me of Asa's songs, 'there is fire on the mountain, and no one seems to be on the run'

I sincerely hope that we can turn this around.

AuntyBspeaks.com gud to talk!