A colleague recently related an incident during which he almost dialled the police from a taxi rank in Namibia’s capital Windhoek. As he approached the rank to get a taxi home from work a man ran to meet him and, panting for lack of breath, asked him: ”Sir, where are you going?”
”I told him I was going home,” he said.
”Please, I shot one!” was the man’s response.
”I thought he had either lost his marbles or had indeed shot someone, was on the run from the police and wanted to hide in my house. I did not seek clarification and kept on walking.
Days later I heard the same young man making the same ‘confession’ to someone else. It dawned on me that he was just a taxi driver trying to make an honest living. What he meant was that he already had three passengers sitting in his four-seater vehicle. One more passenger and he would be on the way!”
Recently I was stopped at a police checkpoint. After checking my driver’s licence, the police officer politely thanked me for cooperating before asking me to ”pass away, pass away.”
I proceeded to a meeting where a polite official told me that the minister would shortly arrive to ”undress” participants —
The foregoing dramatise the challenges that some English second language speakers from different walks of life encounter when they try to communicate in English , the official language in most of Southern Africa.
Since the 1999 English Language Teacher Development Project study of the English language proficiency of teachers in Namibia, it has been acknowledged officially that most Namibian teachers across the board do not have an adequate level of proficiency in the English language to be able to teach in the country’s schools.
This critical lack of proficiency has far-reaching consequences and is likely to have a negative impact on the quality of learning and student achievement.
Namibia was ruled by non-English speakers for a long time. It was colonised by Germans and then by apartheid South Africa. Before independence in 1990, the official language was Afrikaans; English was adopted as the country’s official language after this.
The critical question is: where is the country going to get the expertise to establish proficiency in the English language when most of the teachers of the language today are those who were denied a chance to study it themselves?
Given the strength of the British pound against the Namibian dollar, any attempt to send teachers in Namibia for training in England is out of the budgetry question.
Bringing teachers from England to teach English in Namibia would also involve high costs that a young, independent country such as Namibia could afford only at the exclusion of other, arguably more pressing social development needs.
Fortunately, countries such as Kenya, Zimbabwe, Zambia and Tanzania have acquired levels of proficiency in the English language comparable with those in Europe and America. So Namibia need not look far for a solution.
Given the relative strength of the Namibian dollar, due to its parallel pegging to the South African rand, it would not be difficult to attract and retain good English teachers from these countries.
As a local economics professor John Odada says: ”SADC is steadily moving towards a regional customs union, which will enable goods and services from member countries to get into other member countries free of duty charges.
These developments provide a basis for drawing upon the pooled resources of the continent for effective teaching of English in countries whose colonial legacy curtailed the promotion of the language.”
Among the challenges facing the SADC is a lack of an inventory of human resources and often countries look to the West for help, instead of looking closer to home for skills.
Working on an SADC inventory of human resources and coordinating the region’s experts to solve the regions problems would be an important step towards addressing the problem. Or should that be undress?
Moses Magadza is the founding and former editor of The Southern Times. He moved to Windhoek to further his studies at the University of Namibia
