Patience Jonathan, wife of the President of Nigeria, Goodluck Ebele Jonathan, is consistently taken to task on Nigerian listserves for the quality of her spoken English.
She is described as either communicating in Nigerian Pidgin English or in an attempt at Standard English which shows significant mistakes.
I have observed two major views on this. One is that she needs to improve her English as befits a public figure and one at that level of prominence. Another is that she is doing fine as a representative of the low level of literacy in English in Nigeria,particularly among Nigerian women, and as a representative of a country in which English is a foreign language imposed by colonialism.
Perhaps Patience chose to address her audience in Nigerian Pidgin English as suits her sensitivity to their level of education and their desires.
Does Patience show adequate understanding of the need to switch language in various contexts? It may be relevant to speak a native language to the people in a village or collection of villages somewhere in Nigeria where that language is their lingua franca,their general language of communication. It might be more relevant to use pidgin in places where pidgin is the lingua franca. In other contexts, depending on the level of exposure and expectations of the audience, it might be more relevant to use Standard English. And even with Standard English,there are levels of sophistication one needs to choose from.
Nigerians, generally, have access to three major language groups- Nigerian Pidgin English, their native languages and Standard English. Many, if not most Nigerians, can speak all three with some degree of skill.
If one chooses to use one or the other, skillful communication implies that one should be fully aware of the right contexts in which to use each one, of the relative principles of each one, and use this knowledge accordingly.
The First Lady might need a competent director of speech making, versed in the need to tailor speeches to the background and expectations of an audience. This director should also have a team of people that do research on local languages, so that even if the First Lady cannot speak those languages, she can incorporate into her speeches some expressions from the language of particular groups she addresses, expressions such as proverbs, lacing her speeches with local color to suggest a sense of identification with the people she addresses.
On the issue of standards of eloquence in speaking, particularly in public speaking, and even more so when you want to persuade or move an audience or generally make them identify with you, all civilizations, I expect, privilege such standards.
I expect eloquent speech is highly regarded in all civilizations. Achebe immortalized this globally for Igbo people in Things Fall Apartthrough the Igbo saying that proverbs are the palm oil with which words are eaten. A Yoruba proverb reinforces this in stating that 'Owe lesin oro. Ti oru basonu, owe la fin wa' meaning 'proverbs are the steeds of discourse. When discourse goes astray, we seek it out using proverbs'. To unravel the implications of that Yoruba expression might take at elast 1,000 words of text. So I will not do that now.The core of this is to note that classical African Africans civilizations, exemplified by these examples from Igbo and Yoruba, hold eloquence,particularly public eloquence, highly.
So whether you are speaking Ijaw, Efik, Hausa, Yoruba, Arabic or even pidgin English, all these languages have their standards of excellence, of quality, in private and public speech.Perhaps the best masters of Nigerian Pidgin English are Edo and Delta states,particularly Warri, in terms of the scope of their vocabulary and the flexibility of structure.
The central argument people are making is that public speaking,particularly for a public figure,much less the First Lady, is a serious business and needs to be treated as such.
Being a First lady is a job, a serious job. What prevents Madame Jonathan from being groomed to do her job better by being trained in how to talk in public?
What standard of communication will Patience Jonathan employ when she has to interact with fellow women like Eileen Sirleaf-Johnson, first female President of Liberia,who has a degree from Harvard's Kennnedy School of Government, or with Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany?
Even if one insists that Patience should give speeches in Ijaw or Nigerian Pidgin since the Chinese and the Israelis give public speeches in their native languages, after that is over, would Patience conduct personal conversation, in Ijaw or in Pidgin or plain Broken English,in which you make up the rules as you go along?
Everyone knows that the most widespread language in Nigeria is English. It is the only language that unifies all Nigerians. All official communication is in Standard English. Most school communication at all levels is in Standard English. For a public figure not to master Standard English, therefore, does not say much for the figure's grasp of their role and, depending on the level of international visibility of that figure, for the image of the country to which that figure belongs.
Those countries where they use native languages in public speeches in international fora have those languages as their official languages of communication, as with Hebrew in Israel.
And lest we run away with illusion- the Israelis are among the best educated people in the Western tradition. Netanyahu studied in the US. His father is the author of a famous book on the history of the Jews in Spain.Lee Hsien Loong, the third Prime Minister of Singapore and son of Lee Kuan Yew,the figure behind the modernization of Singapore into an Asian Tiger, has degrees from Cambridge and Harvard. Ghaddafi's son has a PhD from the London Schol of Economics. Libya had already concluded plans to train their country's political elite at LSE before the plan began to unravel in the current Libyan crisis.
As people here have observed, Obama with a BA and a Harvard law degree has a team of speech writers with whom he works to craft his speeches.
Michelle Obama underwent significant image remodelling in terms of her physical appearance and mode of verbal presentation after she made some volatile comments on the campaign trail. Michelle Obama also has an Ivy League law degree. One can enumerate on and on with such examples.
Why do these people go to all these trouble?
Beceause they realise, in an environment where there is fierce competition for votes, that public image is 50 percent,if not more, of the struggle for those votes and that what one says accounts for more than 50 percent of public image.Obama's speeches were at the core of his victory with Caucasian voters.
Ideally, a Nigerian First Lady should be trained in pidgin English,her native language, other Nigerian native languages, Standard English and other world languages.
thanks
Toyin
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