Recently Ugandans on Twitter were divided on a tweet from Serbian-Ugandan PR guru Nada Andersen that said, “Luganda at the expense of English has set us back a century”
It opened a discussion on how Ugandan are we and how comfortable are we in embracing our culture and in speaking our languages.
Language is a uniting factor in many countries and while I wouldn’t want to ask Nada what the official language of Serbia is, we all know the answer to it.
What this matter-of-fact opinion misses is the influence language has had on development and on many economies in the 20th century, especially for the Asian Tigers.
In the 1990s, the Asia miracle to development notes the influence of language in boosting the development strategy for the Asian Tigers. Chinese, Singaporeans and Koreans don’t speak English, they write and speak in their native languages. And this unity made it easy for them to forge a way forward for a development that embraced their culture wholly.
In learning from these Asian Tigers, one needs to note that Uganda in the 90s was way ahead of South Korean, the year is 2019, South Korean is many years ahead of Uganda.
Nada presents English as the panacea to our development, I beg to note that Scandinavian countries that are rated to have the highest indexes in human capital, health care, gender equality and are the epitome of happiness scales are either dutch speaking or Swedish speaking countries. Need I say, English is not the preferred language for these developed countries.
It has been posed that Uganda being multilingual is challenging as opposed to single lingual nations. Yet we have countries on the African continent that have developed in a multilingual dynamic.
Kenya is multilingual, and has made kiswahili thrive over English. One cannot overlook the strides they are making along the development scale. They have the Gikuyu, Luo, Luhya speaking their native languages alongside Kiswahili as the official language
South Africa is a blend of zulu, xhosa,Sotho,Venda,Swati,Tsonga and has over thirty five languages but I hear them make language part of speaking English. They speak their language in parliament and it is mandated on the speaker of the house to offer translation devices for those that don’t know the dialects. South Africa’s development is thriving in a blend of the native languages and English. And not a negation of one for the other.
Luganda and any other local language has not set us back as a country, I dare say, if we had developed in our native language we would be farther than we are.
To glorify English is some sort of colonial mindset. What has speaking Luganda got to do with our development in negation to our urgent reality of Autocratic leadership, corruption and core apathy. You risk sounding unschooled in the realities around you for a person who lives in Uganda.
We as a Nation are grappling with far worse issues than lingual. Albeit, a push for our local languages as official modes of communication would propel us farther than English would. Because I am certain, no country ever develops in a foreign language.
Tricia Gloria Nabaye
Research Fellow at Great Lakes Institute for Strategic Studies.