HURIWA is mobilising over 200 lawyers to file a class-action suit against the Federal Government for abolishing Nigeria’s mother-tongue education policy, calling the reversal a cultural and educational tragedy
HURIWA Set to Sue FG Over Scrapping of Mother-Tongue Education, Calls Move “Educational Suicide”
The Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria (HURIWA) has vowed to drag the Federal Government to court over its decision to abolish the National Language Policy (NLP), which mandated the use of indigenous languages as the medium of instruction in early education.
Describing the reversal as “cultural, scientific, and educational suicide,” HURIWA said it has begun mobilising more than 200 lawyers and cultural leaders nationwide to file a class-action lawsuit against the move.
HURIWA’s National Coordinator, Comrade Emmanuel Nnadozie Onwubiko, said the planned litigation aims to stop President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s administration from implementing the cancellation announced last week.
The controversy began after the Minister of Education, Dr. Tunji Alausa, declared the scrapping of the 2022 National Language Policy at the 2025 Language in Education International Conference in Abuja.
The original policy stipulated that children from Early Childhood Education to Primary Six should be taught in their mother tongue or the language of their immediate community.
However, Alausa insisted that “extensive data analysis and evidence” had shown that the use of indigenous languages in early schooling was damaging educational outcomes.
“Using the mother tongue language in Nigeria for the past 15 years has literally destroyed education in certain regions,”
the minister claimed, arguing that students taught primarily in indigenous languages recorded the poorest national exam results and struggled with basic English comprehension.
He therefore declared that English would now be the sole medium of instruction at all education levels.
HURIWA rejected the Minister’s claims as baseless, accusing the government of weaponising misinformation to justify a policy reversal that undermines national identity.
The rights group argued that less than 6% of Nigerian schools had even implemented mother-tongue instruction, making the minister’s analysis “statistically impossible.”
“Does it even make sense to teach our children in a foreign language of English when most of the greatest scholars and thinkers initiated their intellectual works in their mother tongue?”
the group queried.
HURIWA further cited global examples—China, Japan, South Korea, France, and Belgium—as nations where mother-tongue education is the norm and students excel in science and technology.
The organisation accused the government of acting under “colonial mentality and inferiority complex”, fabricating statistics to justify the cancellation.
HURIWA called on State Houses of Assembly to enact their own laws mandating mother-tongue instruction in early education, irrespective of federal policy.
The group insisted that abandoning indigenous languages in schools would accelerate cultural erosion and widen learning gaps rather than solve them. Read More
