How much of a reading problem do we have in Nigeria today?

On the surface, it is not all too visible but in the course of interacting with people in the field, it is coming out quite well that there is indeed a very grave problem.

Another thing to note about the crisis of reading in Nigeria is that it is indeed diverse in its manifestation.

I will explain by reporting two meetings that I had in the first three weeks of the year 2012.

The first was with the Proprietress of Utol Schools, Arepo, Ogun State, Mrs. Oladeji and the other was with Dr. Supo Jegede of the Faculty of Education, University of Lagos.


For Oladeji, a lot of the reading difficulty she sees has to do with the fact that many schools and parents do not pay attention to the fact that reading and literacy by extension were creative activities that need to be addressed most creatively, particularly at the infant stage. 

She harps on the need for parents to find time to read to their children, buy additional reading materials for them, maintain home libraries and generally be involved in homework and curriculum support and tracking.


For schools, she counsels they should not just get children to learn alphabets and words but to ensure that the whole educational process builds on the natural inclinations of the children to music, symbolism and play. This she says will take away a lot of the tedium from the reading process and get the children to enjoy reading as a natural and delight-some experience. Equally she wants them to develop their own libraries, continue to stock it, and very importantly, get the children to use it and enjoy using it.

I will continue with Dr. Jegede's submissions in another post.

Meanwhile, in continuation of our arrangements for the Nigerian National Reading Week 2012 holding from April 23-29, we are calling on everyone out there who is already a reader and would want to be involved with helping to get others to read, continue to read and enjoy reading to stand up to be counted. 

In line with our desire to carry all along, we are actively encouraging such individuals and organisations to bring in their own inputs and programmes into the common pool for the Reading Week. 

A number of writers, libraries, reading promoters, publishers and booksellers are already signing up for our events, designing their own programmes and are in talks with us and you are welcome to join in too. We have such a reading crisis in the country that everyone that can should simply do his bit. 

And as you do this, please pass on all confirmed organisational details to us in time so we can also help publicize it for other people to attend your own session. 

A step-by-step and cost-effective guide to organising such an event will be published on these pages shortly.

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. 

National Reading Week/Longest Nigerian Story

Hello,

As part of my reading promotions activities this year, 2012, i am inviting you to work
with and support me as i organise the National Reading Week to hold from Monday
April 23 through Sunday, April 29.
We would be hosting reading events in schools and public places all over the country
and would acknowledge your support and assistance as you give it.
As part of the activities, we would open up a website where school children from all
over Nigeria can contribute to writing 'the longest nigerian story.'
Please give your support in any way you can. I am very open to suggestions,
donations and ideas.

Person of the year:The Nigerian People

My person of the year? The Nigerian people,who are slowly,surely engaging the system frontally, asking hard and tough questions,demanding plain-truth answers from their leaders and refusing to be taken for granted as had commonly been the case before now.As the late Christopher Okigbo put it in another context, it's 'hurray for thunder!'

Bring Back the Book: Engaging President Jonathan on our terms

Bring Back the Book: Engaging Jonathan on our terms

This piece was first contributed to www.differencenews.com on December 1, 2011 

By Richard Mammah

Chinua Achebe

The formal involvement of the Nigerian President earlier in the year in a reading promotions encounter set in the mould of the ‘Bring Back the Book Campaign’ definitely gives the impression that good times may be here for the Nigerian Book once again.
An impression yes, but that also conflicts with the clearly very clumsy way the administration handled the public relations fallout of the rejection – and for a second time too – by Nigeria’s pre-eminent reading champion, Chinua Achebe, of a national honour offered him by the same Presidency.
In rejecting the award, the author of the 1958 classic, Things Fall Apart had reportedly stated that the current occupants of the Aso Rock villa had not done much in improving the socio-political and economic climate in the country as to warrant his giving the renewed offer a second look.
And while someone may be tempted to ask what a writer’s business is with the social order, politics and the economy, the appropriate response here would be to send the questioner on a Google mission to look up and read the text of a speech the same Achebe read while accepting another national honour offered him in the 1980s. To give one more clue, that treatise was aptly titled, ‘what has literature got to do with it?’
Away from treasure hunting and negatives however, this writer prefers to look at the opportunity introduced by the Goodluck Jonathan-Bring Back the Book initiative as one of those rare moments of possibility for the expansion of the place of the book in our national life. However, as with other opportunities before this one, it is being borne out that it is really more of how the system actors respond to the opportunity more than the primal intention of the original anchors that would ultimately make the difference as to how far the project can go. And we will look no further than to the history of our engagement with the book to add flesh to this thesis.
For starters, it is almost now beyond debate that the first wave of our modern experience with the book came with the proselytizing efforts of Christian missionaries. In responding to the package however, local communities soon began to explore more firmly the secular dimensions of this pre-eminent book project, tapping into the harambee spirit to pick and send the best brains from within the community through scholarship schemes to go back to the source from where those first seeds came to get all of the Golden Fleece.
This paid off handsomely for the new nation as representatives of this generation not only established very firm foundations for a book society, they also bought into the anti-colonial logic with which they later pushed off the formal domination of the colonialists.
Indeed, it is this development and deepening of the anti-colonial movement that was to provide the second opportunity for the flourishing of the book in Africa. As the new elite immersed themselves in the debate over the future of the continent, they set up sundry newspapers, wrote and published books and established political parties as a natural anchor of the enveloping ferment.
This connection between developments in the socio-political space and the growth of the book sector continued in the decade of the 1970s and 1980s when first, the indigenous publishers began to stand up to be counted and then the African book conferences and fairs, those big ticket platforms for calling attention to products and developments within the industry, were also being organized. Reaching its initial peak in the long-rested Ife International Bookfair, and moving on to Harare, Calabar, Lagos and now Cape Town, these advocacy platforms also provided opportunities for the crystallizing African books sector to firmly and frontally take its place within the increasingly maturing continent.
With the development of the book space has also come some attention to its cousin, the reader. Thus, emerging side by side, progress in one has seen associated concern for the other. In Nigeria particularly, as the authors emerged and the publishing scene deepened, we also saw commendable efforts and initiatives on the reading promotions plane.
For example, the movement into independence saw not only the revolutionary expansion of the educational space as was notably the case in Obafemi Awolowo’s Western Region, this was complemented by the aggressive library expansion and reading promotions schemes within the region with many towns playing host to well-stocked and promoted public libraries, in addition to mobile library services and the almost unhindered use of state radio, television and print media in this effort.
Not left out of the developing ferment were the newly established publishing organizations which also began to float their own readership promotions initiatives as exemplified in the Onibonoje readers club of the 1970s. At the national level, the National Library of Nigeria undertook a series of Reading campaigns, Radio Nigeria and the Nigerian Television Authority were drafted into the fray even as several other state-owned and reader-friendly print media and indeed book publishing organizations were also established and run. Notable of this was the Nigeria magazine project of the Federal Ministry of Information and Culture and Ethiope Publishing Company that was set up by the government of the then Mid-Western State.
Not left out of the entire scheme and with a view to firmly establishing their own tentacles in the unfolding dynamics, professionals and other stakeholders at different levels of the book chain also organized themselves accordingly. These included the Nigerian Publishers Association, the Association of Nigerian Authors, the Nigerian Booksellers Association, the Association of Nigerian Printers, the Nigerian Librarians Association, the Reading Association of Nigeria and the Network for the Promotion of Reading.
It is within this historical frame then that the Jonathan Presidency in those early days when it needed to define for itself some thematic thrust that it believed was going to be hopefully different from that of its predecessors commenced the Bring Back the Book campaign.
An initiative which saw the President reading to an assembly of school children and other young people and bibliophiles at its commencement in Lagos, it was further expected to develop into a national book advocacy movement, calling attention to reading and indeed the book sector and its products.
Sadly however, the dream appears to have lapsed and this notably for several reasons, one of which is clearly a poverty of project conception, but another, and more important for this writer at this point is a stark absence of meaningful stakeholder response to the initiative and structural engagement of the President and his implementing team.
While someone may argue at the face value that the Bring Back the Book scheme was not in the first place designed by stakeholders and as such they should therefore not be held responsible for its multiple incapacities, the reality of the democratic project which we are incipiently engaged in now suggests otherwise.
In a democracy, there is a continuous struggle for issue elevation and resource allocation. What issues get to be addressed depends in the first place on their being put in the front burner and then on how many resources do get allocated to it. And finally, there is the issue of implementation which is again invariably helped by sustained stakeholder engagement, pressure, lobbying, tracking, monitoring and resoluteness.
It is these political variables that those who are massively benefiting from the current political order very well know and work with. Whether it is in sinister forms as securing vexatious and phony multi-billion naira waivers or ensuring that the Petroleum Industry Bill (PIB) does not see the light of day or even in more progressive formats as scuttling obnoxious third term ambitions and halting ill-defined subsidy removal gambits, the name of the game is: ‘stay on top of your matter!’
For many of us however, this very simple line of action does not come natural. And understandably so too. While the final word on why this is so may be left to a more discriminating sociologist to exegete, this writer however has a pet notion that somewhere between our history and culture, something has happened to the average African as to leave him massively powerless. This is the explanation for our virtual incapacity to engage the power systems in our land, even when they pass the ball to us as has unwittingly been done in the current ‘Bring Back the Book’ matter.
But all hope is not lost. At the formal inauguration of the Network for the Promotion of Reading in Nigeria at Ibadan in 1998, some of us were challenged to do something about the then sorry state of the Nigerian Book and Reading space. And we rose to the challenge and did. Spending the better part of the last six months engaging myself in about all the major book convocations and chatting with many of the stakeholders in the land, it is clear that for all of the gains secured since then, we continue to be saddled with the reality of many small ticket book convocations when we can do more together to inaugurate the one (or more) most desirable big ticket platform (s) that would provide super-space for all of us to better engage the system and build the firmer book and reading space we have long sought and desired..
Am I by this asking that we shut down or merge all existing platforms and organizations. No. But until we shed the mental togas of small space survivalism and begin to take more solidly coordinated organizational steps to confront the challenge of Nigeria’s big ticket book games, we will sadly not get to our desired success peak. This in my view is the challenge of the moment and a good place to begin is with a thorough and most critical stakeholder re-engagement of the Bring Back the Book project. So who is calling the conference?

 Mammah, author of History and Prospects of the Nigerian Book is Executive Director of the reading promotions and book advocacy watchdog, Synergy Educational.

e-books in Nigeria

In  a book I published in 2003 titled The Nigerian Books Directory and Guide, I wondered when Nigeria would be catching in on the e-books train. That is the subject of the Publishers Forum at the CORA bookfair holding in Lagos tomorrow. And I will be there.
 Details and reports to follow. Cheers.

Citizen Emmanuel Okoro

We celebrate and salute today the devotion and sense of duty of one Nigerian who has been dogged and consistent in the pursuit of things books in this land. He is Citizen Emmanuel Okoro.  Since 1997 when our paths crossed at Synergy Educational, he has remained consistent on this set course, almost never flagging nor faltering for a moment or the other.

I am particularly writing this because of a recent incident involving Emma (as we call him in the course of everyday conversation) while he was immersed in one of his book advocacy jaunts. He had set out to participate in the just ended 2011 national convention of the Christian Booksellers Association of Nigeria (CBAN) held in Port Harcourt, Rivers State.

Having left Lagos on Tuesday, November 1 and being billed to spend all of the week at the event, I was surprised to hear him say when I called to get a status report on the Thursday of the event that he was on his way back to Lagos! I wished him a safe journey back and waited for him to return to ask why the change in arrangements.

‘Oga mi, there was really not much going on at the event. The audience was sparse and there was really nothing phenomenal in the programme to keep someone there for long’

I could identify with him. Having attended the Western Zone fair of CBAN held in Maryland, Lagos earlier in the year and noticing myself that the programme was largely non-spectacular, I put two and two and concluded that there is indeed work for people like Emmanuel Okoro to do in helping to further grow the Nigerian book space. But do the current core drivers of that space really understand this and would they make room for determined bibliophiles like our own Emma to contribute their own bit in this continuing evolution?

The next major book event in the national calendar is the CORA event holding at Freedom Park, Lagos from November 17 to 19 and by God’s grace, yours truly would be there and send out fresh reports on the event to you from there. A reading Nigeria is possible!