English came on a boat? If only we had the Somali pirates back then...

Iganga Municipal Council in Eastern Uganda has resolved to ditch the English language and conducts its official business in the local language Lusoga! All council deliberations shall as of this month henceforth be done in the vernacular, apparently to enable councillors who are not competent in English to participate fully.

After the recent general election, these councillors caused embarrassment all around because they could not be sworn in in English. Iganga is the major town after Jinja on the highway to Mombasa, Kenya.

I am writing this comment from Dar es Salaam. When I first came here in 2004, I stepped on a live wire when I wrote a comment in the Monitor newspaper about the problems caused by the killing off of English in Tanzania.

It was picked up from the Internet and many Tanzanians in the diaspora wanted to lynch me while many inside Tanzania supported me. Interestingly, the diaspora Tanzanians all posted their arguments in English, and I bet all their kids go to English medium schools.

I have since learnt to refrain from commenting in anti-English debates. Time vindicated me this year when a study conducted around East Africa found that Kenyan school kids do better in Kiswahili than Tanzanians!

So when Kenya promoted both English and Kiswahili, the Kenyan kids ended up better in both languages than the Tanzanians who only promoted Kiswahili. Promoting English does not kill African languages.

Smoother accent

Tanzanians, of course, speak rather more graceful Kiswahili than Kenyans. Even I, as a Ugandan, do that! Whenever I am in Nairobi, I meet Kenyans who think I know more Kiswahili than they do, which of course is not true.

I just speak my little Kiswahili with a smoother accent than the Kenyans — an accent picked up from the Tanzanians. And Kenyans imagine I know the language really well. Kumbe, my vocabulary is much poorer than theirs!

Back to Iganga. This cosmopolitan town on an international highway didn’t even consider introducing Kiswahili, Uganda’s second official language, as the medium to use in council business. Imagine that. People in poor countries sometimes take this nationalism thing to absurd levels.

Online debates about the Iganga resolution have been fierce, all of them conducted in English. Someone warned that if the Iganga council were left to continue with its Lusoga scheme, another tribe in Iganga will also demand that debate be conducted in their mother tongue. That is how we have ended up with more districts than counties in Uganda.

But the decision to kill English and adopt Lusoga was taken democratically in council. One of these days, the Kampala council could take a resolution on the same grounds as Iganga — that councillors need to express themselves competently.

This is not a theoretical prediction. The immediate former mayor of Kampala could not express himself properly in English, a deficiency that endeared him to the voters. Since the majority of Kampala’s councillors speak Luganda as their first language, they can democratically opt to dump English in favour of the Kabaka’s language.

Joachim Buwembo is a Knight International fellow for development journalism. E-mail: buwembo@gmail.com