Ghanaian broadcast Journalist, Gilbert Abeiku Aggrey Santana aka Abeiku Santana has expressed displeasure over government’s decision to adopt French as Ghana’s second official language.
Abeiku Santana opposes gov’t decision to make French a secondary language, here’s why.
According to the media personality, the current education is in shambles as students already have issues with the English language and adding French will make it worse.
“There has been an inconsistency with our educational curriculum. From 1987 that we changed our educational curriculum from the Middle School Leaving Certificate to BECE, what we call the Junior Secondary School, and later we change to, we change titles, the working titles of it but nothing changes.
We just change it from Junior Secondary School to Junior High School. I think that we are joking and toying with our educational system let alone to say that we going to make French a second language.
Even our first language, the English language is a big problem. You can go and check from the Ghana Education Service and the West African Examination Council performance of English, and even today as we speak, those who have graduated from University, their kind of English construction.
Why is that, even if you have a pass in English and want to attend some Universities outside Ghana, they demand TOEFL – The Test Of English for Foreign Language students, why, because the quality of the English we speak, they don’t classify and consider it as the standard, that is why you have to write English test before admission into some Universities in the UK and in America.
So we are going to burden ourselves again with a second language, in which excuse me to say, it will be difficult for us to communicate with because predominantly we have over 26 ethnic tribes or groups in Ghana and we communicate in the local dialect, why can’t we make our local language a number one or the first language, why?
If you speak English and you make mistake, hey, unheard of but we are comfortable when people are pronouncing towns, villages and names locally and they make mistakes, we are alright. We are losing our sense of pride.
It doesn’t happen in East Africa. Go to East Africa, Swahili is the most predominant language. They speak it parliament. Go to Kenya and South Africa, they speak Swahili. Zulus also speak their language.
We are changing our language and very soon, we will have nothing show. I am sorry; I disagree with the Honourable Foreign Affairs Minister. If we are trying to please our French partners, we are not going anywhere, we’ll not go any far with this, because we teach the kids French in school, they come home, they can’t come and speak French with me because I wasn’t taught French and I don’t know when we are going to reverse this or when we are going to change this,” he stated.
However, Abeiku Santana is not the only celebrity to be against this decision. The ‘Rap doctor’, Okyeame Kwame has also criticized the ministry for taking such a decision.
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the day this elephant followers will lean sense Ghana would have been sold.
Anyway Abeeku, the world is not all about Tarkwa and Mankesim. I thought you were an exposed person and had couple of degrees? I am also sorry but you are very narrow minded. You don't even understand the world around you. I thought people like you will be aspiring to be working for the likes of BBC, CANAL France, etc. Go apply that job with your noisy Twi and Fanti. You have been living in Accra for years but I can bet, you cannot speak the ga language. You are a media person and language is your CV. Broaden your horizon.
The best decision of the government. Stop commenting on every issue you these media people.We are also good thinkers.
I totally support the government decision to introduce french as a second language. You see four years ago i missed an appointment with john Deere (a multinational company in India) as a sales territory manager for west africa simply because i cannot speak french. In international business, language is very important and most of our neighboring countries speaks french.By this introduction i think it will create opportunities for our students.
Politicians you know what, ask all those who have gone before you to the grave none of this matter... Do the RIGHT thing.
What we need is a 2nd international language, non of our local languages come close to that. The debate should be which international language that we should choose, even if it's one of our local ones. Even USA have English, Spanish and French as official languages.
The Chinese speak their own language ,India English and Hindi and they going forward.The widely speaking language in Ghana is Akan or Twi .Let us think again about .Please let french be optional.
Please let's ignore him, he is just doing the bidding of his party. Opposing every thing just for nothing. Ask him if he is prepared to accept Ewe or Nzema as our 2nd official language. Ghana needs a 2nd official international language, and it's natural to choose French. Note that Swahili is an international language, but all our local languages, except Hausa is international. If you have ever missed an appointment because of not knowing a 2nd international language, like you would keep your mouth shut.
The comments show how far we need to go to cure the disease of inferiority complex.The only solution is to choose one out of the numerous languages we have as a national language in addition to the so called official language we have now and send the rest of the languages we have to the school of languages.We can therefore master over the language we have chosen.You go to Holland and they speak better English than us although it's not official language in Netherlands. I don't know what is wrong with Africans
in fact Ghana need to make french a a compulsory course for all students from basic for at least SHS.Whether 2nd or eve 100th language. Most Ghanaian have lost top African regional and even UN position because of their inability to speak french.Meanwhile, our francophone neighbors can speak a bit of English. You name an astute Ghanaian diplomat and i can assure you he/she is able to express him/herself in french. The fact that we did not learn it during our time does not mean it cant be done now. Times are fast changing. My thoughts as a citizen.