Some primary and secondary schools in Port Harcourt say the new national anthem is difficult to learn and they still sing the old anthem.
This comes almost a month after President Bola Tinubu signed the National Anthem Bill 2024 into law, reverting to the 1960 anthem, "Nigeria, We Hail Thee." Teachers in the schools told Nigeria Info that they need time to learn the new national anthem before they teach their students.
“You know most of us were not born and even those that brought it, many of them cannot recite it. But we have started teaching the students,’’ a male teacher said.
“It's just like something that they impose on us, unexpectedly, so what we will do now, is to write it down on the board, then we will be learning it. I believe gradually we will perfect it,” complained a female teacher.
Other teachers whose students have started singing the new national anthem shared how they achieved it.
“We used sofa notation. At first, it was difficult to teach them, so we had to go through sofa notation and we were able to get it,” a female teacher from a primary school said.
“The school administrator ensures that the students learn it on the assembly ground. The audio was played for the students to listen to the lyrics, and then they learned it verse by verse. She also ensured that the civic education teachers made the national anthem part of their continuous assessment test, CAT,” said a male teacher who works in a secondary school.
“When it's time for the national anthem during the assembly, two students hold up the cardboard paper with the lyrics written on it, and students sing based on what they see from the cardboard paper,” another male teacher said.
In the meantime, the Rivers State Director of the National Orientation Agency (NOA), Young Ayo-Tamuno, said anyone still singing the old national anthem is violating the law. He noted that the agency is visiting schools to assess compliance with the new national anthem.
“The new national anthem has been uploaded on the NOA website; the lyrics and the song. Our Community Orientation and Mobilization Officers are currently going around schools to see their level of compliance with the new national anthem. So far, there is some substantial level of compliance by most schools. If there are still some schools that are not complying then it means that those schools are going against the laws of the land,” he said.
President Tinubu signed the National Anthem Bill 2024 into law on 29 May to mark the Silver Jubilee of Nigeria’s Fourth Republic and his first year in office. The bill transitioned the national anthem from the widely recognized "Arise, O Compatriots" to the reinstated "Nigeria, We Hail Thee."
