What is the Importance of Language in Governance?

At a recent speaking engagement, a member of the audience put a question to the African Democratic Congress’ (ADC) Lagos gubernatorial candidate, Gbadebo Rhodes-Vivour (GRV). The question was posed in Yoruba, and the audience expected him to answer in the same language. He began his reply in English, saying that he had listened to the criticism that followed the last election, and that he had learned to speak Yoruba better. GRV made it a point to emphasise that he is in the “business of governance.” The last remark carried an unspoken suggestion, which was that language is not his highest priority, unlike governance.

For many people in the room and many more online, that answer was not satisfactory. It is worth slowing down to ask why, because the moment touches something larger than one candidate or one election. It forces us to ask what we truly want from those who lead us, and what we are really measuring when we say that someone does not deserve our votes.

The best place to begin is with the argument that a governor of Lagos must speak Yoruba, because it is a serious argument and deserves to be treated as one. Lagos is an innately Yoruba state, it is a melting pot of many tongues and cultures and not everyone speaks English. These people pay their taxes, collect their voter cards, and have probably lived in Lagos for all their lives. A governor who cannot speak to them in the language of their daily lives risks ruling through intermediaries, and anyone who has relied on a translator knows that something is always lost on the way. Tone is lost, humour is lost, and the small signals that tell a listener whether a speaker can be trusted are lost as well.

Many Lagosians want to feel seen, and  they want to believe the person at the top can hear them without needing an intermediary.

That argument is a fair one, but it also has limits. It is not speaking Yoruba that makes a good governor. Lagos has had its share of poorly managed seasons under leaders who spoke the language fluently. Even so, it would be naive to pretend that effort does not matter. A leader who treats the language as a courtesy worth earning will usually be forgiven more than one who treats it as an optional extra.

Interestingly, GRV is not a man who knows no Yoruba at all. By his own account, he has spent years learning, and he has made progress. What he lacks is the native ease that local ears listen for, the rhythm, the idiom and the quick turn of phrase that comes only from growing up inside a language. If the objection were only about proficiency, it would be fair to say that effort and improvement deserve some credit.

But the objection is rarely only about proficiency, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. Many of the people who say they will not vote for him because of his Yoruba were probably never going to vote for him in the first place. Language has become a respectable excuse for a less respectable reason. His mother is Igbo, and to a certain kind of mind that makes him only half Yoruba, and therefore not Yoruba enough. During the 2023 elections, ethnic bigotry was openly directed at him and his supporters in Lagos, and much of it had nothing to do with how he spoke. When a candidate is judged by the ethnicity of his mother, the conversation has stopped being about communication, rather it has become tribalism dressed in the clothes of cultural pride, and no amount of excuses can change what it is.

Another complication,  and this one is of his own making, is some of his old tweets resurfacing. He appears to have mocked Yoruba people. Whether he meant them as harmless jokes or as something sharper, they have landed badly, and they have given his critics something concrete to point at. A candidate who is already doubted on the question of his Yorubaness cannot afford to have been careless about the people whose votes he now seeks. This strand of criticism should not be dismissed as tribalism, because it is a fair question about respect and about how he sees the people he wishes to govern. He owes the public a clear and honest explanation, and a vague appeal to context will not be enough.

To understand why the matter is so charged, it helps to step back and look at Lagos for what it is. It is not a village or a homogenous town. It is a megacity of more than twenty million people, the commercial heart of West Africa, and for decades it was the capital of the nation. Igbo traders, Hausa merchants, Edo workers, Ijaw families, and many others have built their lives and their fortunes here, and a large number of them were born in Lagos and have never known another home. At the same time, Lagos is Yoruba land, and that fact is not being contested. The Awori, the Egba, the Ijebu and others have deep roots in this soil, and their language, festivals and institutions give the city much of its character. A people who feel that their homeland is being swallowed by a crowd of newcomers will naturally hold tightly to what makes them distinct.

The difficulty is that a city which draws its wealth from everyone must eventually decide whether it can narrow the definition of who may lead it. The question is not unique to Lagos. It is the central question of every great metropolis, and the answers that cities give tell us a great deal about them.

In New York, Zohran Mamdani is now mayor. He was born in Kampala, Uganda, to parents of Indian heritage, and he is a Muslim. On paper he is about as far from the old image of a New York mayor as it is possible to be, yet New Yorkers elected him in large numbers. He did not win by hiding who he was. He campaigned in several of the languages that the city speaks, including Spanish, Urdu, Hindi and Bengali, and he addressed voters in the voices of their own neighbourhoods. His central message was about rent, buses and the cost of living, which are the things that people feel in their pockets every month. Enough voters concluded that what mattered most was whether he understood their problems, and that the question of where he was born mattered far less.

It would be unfair to present New York as a paradise of tolerance. Mamdani also faced hostility and open Islamophobia, and many of the attacks on him were ugly. But the fact remains that the city could hear those attacks and still choose him. It is tempting for Lagosians to say that New Yorkers have simply reached a level of enlightenment that Lagos has yet to reach, and the temptation is understandable. Yet that reading is too quick and too harsh. New York is a city built by successive waves of immigrants, and no group there can claim to be its original owners in the way that the Yoruba can claim Lagos. Lagos still has an indigenous population that holds political and cultural claim to the land, and this makes the situation trickier.

London elected Sadiq Khan, the son of Pakistani immigrants and the son of a bus driver, and then re-elected him more than once. Yet the city and the UK at large still argue about who counts as truly English, and the arguments have not gone away. Every great city wrestles with the same tension between the people who were there first and the people who made it what it is — a metropolis. Lagos is simply facing that tension now, and facing it in a country where ethnicity has long been the chief fault line of politics, especially when elections are fast approaching.

Lagos can keep Yoruba at the heart of its culture, its schools, its media and its public life. It can expect, and even demand, that anyone who seeks to lead it makes a serious and visible effort to learn the language. These are reasonable positions, and most Lagosians of any background would accept them. What is not reasonable is the stratification that excludes GRV as notYoruba enough.

Gbadebo Rhodes-Vivour may well lose in the coming elections, and there are many sound reasons why a voter might choose another candidate. His plans, his record, his temperament and his judgement are all legitimate grounds for debate. His old tweets are also fair game, and they deserve  answers. But if he loses mainly because of his less than proficient Yoruba, then Lagos will have revealed something about itself that it may not enjoy seeing — a future of intolerance and a lack of respect for the diversity that makes the state what it is.