Nigeria's government has reversed course on a 2022 policy that made Indigenous languages the primary teaching medium for the first six years of school. English is now the sole language of instruction across all education levels, from pre-primary through university.
Education Minister Tunji Alausa announced the shift at a language conference in Abuja in November 2025, pointing to exam failure rates in regions that adopted mother tongue instruction. "We have to talk about evidence, not emotions," he said, framing the decision as data-driven governance.
The reversal sits at the heart of a genuine tension in education policy: how do you balance learning in a child's first language—which research consistently shows aids comprehension and retention—against the practical reality of a country with over 500 languages and limited resources to train teachers and produce textbooks in each one.
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Linguists and cultural advocates have pushed back hard. The Nigerian Academy of Letters called the decision a loss, arguing that education in mother tongue connects students to "the deepest and most authentic sources of knowledge." The Linguistic Association of Nigeria launched a petition warning the reversal would harm educational access for rural and Indigenous children, who often struggle most when instruction jumps straight to English.
But others see the policy reversal as pragmatic. Public commentator Tosin Adeoti noted that Nigeria's infrastructure—teacher training, textbooks, classroom materials—simply isn't built to deliver primary education in dozens of languages at once. He argued that mother tongue preservation doesn't have to live or die by classroom instruction: it could happen through dedicated language classes, cultural studies, community programs, and digital archiving instead.
This isn't a straightforward case of progress versus tradition. The 2022 mother tongue policy was genuinely ambitious—a recognition that children learn better in languages they speak at home. But ambition without infrastructure often collapses into poor execution. The question now is whether Nigeria's government will actually invest in the alternative approaches Adeoti outlined, or whether this becomes simply a return to English-only classrooms that leave many children behind.
For now, the Ministry of Education has given no signal it plans to revisit the decision.
