Theme for the National Reading Week 2012

We are most encouraged by the support we are getting from all over Nigeria and beyond for our National Reading Week 2012. People are writing and calling in, asking questions on details, making refreshing inputs and generally taking their place in this reading promotions fiesta.

One such call this week led us to the theme for the 2012 edition we had been searching for. It is 'the joy of reading!'

The dates, be reminded, are Monday April 23 running through Sunday April 29. The choice of dates has been deliberate. For almost two decades now, the United Nations though its agency, the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) has adopted and marked April 23 as World Book Day. In other climes, the date is associated with the birth of two most accomplished authors. These are the English bard, Willam Shakespeare and the Spanish storyteller, Cervantes, author of Don Quixote. It is also a date that several reading promotions organisations in Nigeria have striven to commemorate.

In arriving at our choice of date therefore, we decided to latch on this date and join other organisations in calling more and sustained attention to the place of the book in our life as a people.

In our own instance here in Nigeria, there is a second bonus for our reading space in the dates which one commentator recently drew our attention to. The Nigerian International Bookfair (NIBF) put together by the Nigerian Bookfair Trust (NBFT) holds early in May every year. For 2012, the specific dates are May 7-13. Without planning to therefore, the national reading week would then serve as some kind of pre-event, a build-up activity to that fair.

One final credit. In the decade of the 1990s, the writer and administrator, Professor Chukwuemeka Ike, in the company of Mabel Segun and other bibliophiles had organised an earlier annual National Book Week. Our modest event would therefore be continuing in that tradition, hopefully to be reinforced by newer perspectives and imperatives.

Sound the word, tell your neighbour the truth you know. That: indeed, a reading people are a most prosperous people.