Indigenous Language Education for Entrepreneurial Skills and Youth Empowerment in Nigeria

Education is a process of imparting knowledge, skill and attitudes to the learners through the appropriate use of languages. The state of Nigeria’s education system had hindered the process of empowerment of youths in the country. The paper examines the role of indigenous languages as an instrument for the provision of qualitative and functional education that would instill in the life of the youth an entrepreneurial skill for self-reliance. Education, formal and non-formal, public awareness and training are considered as key processes by which humans and the society can reach their full potential. However, despite the huge investment of Nigerian government in education at all levels, many Nigerians are still wallowing in abject poverty. The youths happened to be the worst affected because they lack the informal type of education that can allow entrepreneurial diversity, therefore their hope is on the government and the few corrupt elites without a mind of being self employed. Indigenous language education which despises idleness, instills discipline and stimulate creativity have become a thing of the past in our society. Data were collected based on variables such as folklore, names, proverbs, taboo through a structured interview of identified resource persons and relevant textbooks and these were analysed. The findings revealed that indigenous language is such a potent tool that will allow youths to diversify their employment search from mainly white-collar jobs to self empowerment, having the strong mind that no job is too low for an idle hand, or else the devil will find work for them. The paper hereby posits that empowering our youth through our indigenous language is the best course of action by exposing them to different teaching in our culture.