Quack Books

my diaryI felt so bored sitting at home doing nothing; I had not gotten my call up letter, so I was practically in a complete state of boredom. I had completed all the household chores, fed the chickens, cooked breakfast, carried lunch to my father at work and all the things that I could think of. The floors were sparkling clean, the curtains washed and ironed, the pots scoured to a high shine. Dinner was already planned and prepared for. So what on earth did one do apart from sleeping? Ok, I could watch movies but there was no electricity supply and I had run through my novels and books over and over again. Worse still, the Muse was unresponsive so, writing was out of the question.  Well, I thought, a reader never gets tired of reading. I went to my sister’s stash of story books. I could read them to occupy myself before everyone came back home.

Lo and behold, what I found in the books gave me serious cause for worry. I was immediately jolted from my state of boredom to a state of anxiety. A cloak of sadness settled heavily upon me and it was quite a long time before I could shake it off.

The books I met in my sister’s stack were quite numerous, of various titles and colours, attractive in picture and cover and nothing more. The contents were terrible. Those books could be correctly termed unfit to be read.

The first thing that struck me was their titles which were uninteresting and boring… ‘Kunle, the Thief’, ‘The Spoilt Child’ etc. Although, one cannot really fault children’s books with no imagination, must the titles really be so predictable?

However, the main fault of these books was the terrible use of language in them. They were so bad that I could not help but wonder how such books ever got into print. The grammatical errors in the books were way beyond typographical errors. It was obvious that the writers and publisher had a faulty command of the English Language! Sentence construction, use of tense and narrative style was more than enough to drive a sane person insane. A bonafide editor or language perfectionist would develop migraine reading them.

Here is a caption of what I saw on one of the books:

‘Chinelo, Favour and Nkem are very good friend, who are in the same class. They does everything together, each of them has his own personal ambition in life. But over ambitioness took over the life of these two friends, that they ended up almost ruining their careers. The lists intelligent of them later became the most successful. But they still have hope. If they change’.

I looked through one book after the other; they had different authors and publishers but had one thing in common. Their substandard use of the English. Oh! Some were better than the others but all were unfit to be let loose on children with impressionable minds. Definitely not the leaders of tomorrow! No wonder I had to constantly correct my sister in her use of the English language. She is just one of many Nigerian children who are subjected to these farce called story books.

I was forced to think of my own early childhood, a large part of what I know and who I am today, I owe to books. Books written by excellent authors such as Kola Onadipe, Mabel Segun, Chinua Achebe and even Enid Blyton shaped me to be what I am. They built my grammar, vocabulary and even my morals. These new generation “books” may not be faulted for teaching morals but their medium of teaching can certainly be faulted.

What comes to mind is who is to blame? Should we point daggers at the writers or the publishers? Should these books even be allowed to circulate at all? I opine that the government look into this matter and set up a body that will formulate some sorts of standard that every book will be measured by. If there is a body that regulates the things we eat, the materials that we use in building our houses and other buildings, price of fuel and other things, why can’t we have a body that would regulate the materials we use in building our future leaders?

 

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