Nigerian students who stammer face barriers and stigmatization in schools

Illustration by Minority Africa, used with permission.

This story was written by Yusuf Adua and originally published by Minority Africa on May 2, 2024. An abridged version is republished below as part of a content-sharing agreement.

In February this year, 27-year-old Abdulqudus Jimoh, who had just gained direct entry into the 200-level archaeology department at the Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria, north-central Nigeria, gave a presentation about data collection and handling in the field of archaeology. “I was struggling to speak,” he recounts. “I understood what I wanted to say but couldn’t articulate it. Sincerely, I felt pain, discouragement, disappointment, and embarrassment.”

Jimoh had endured mockery throughout his higher diploma program at the same university, so before gaining admission to pursue his undergraduate degree, he hesitated to fully commit himself, fearing a similar experience. “Stammering is not only impeding my studies,” he says, “it is halting my leadership roles as a student because I know I have all the leadership qualities except this.”

Unlike other students who can communicate easily, Jimoh says when he forces a word from his mouth, he feels a sharp and searing pain in his chest. As a result, he doesn’t ask or answer questions in class, which he believes strongly affects his academic life. Additionally, some of his classmates interrupt him or fail to pay attention when he speaks, making it difficult for him to participate in group projects and collaborative tasks.

The challenge of making presentations is something Omosalewa Akanbi-Neander can relate to. “I prefer exams to be in written form,” he explains. “Whenever exams are conducted orally or require presentations, I struggle. My project defense didn't go as planned because of my stuttering. I might be knowledgeable in about 80 percent of the content I want to discuss, but due to my stuttering, I can only convey about 40 percent.”

Initially, Akanbi-Neander aspired to follow in his father's footsteps as a lawyer — until he came to terms with the challenges a career in law would pose for someone with a stutter: “A stammerer may find it challenging to defend his client speaking in the courtroom. So I had to tweak my ambition.” However, studying political science between 2007 and 2011 at Redeemer’s University in Ede, located in Nigeria's Osun state, proved equally challenging.

In separate interviews, both Jimoh and Akanbi-Neander acknowledged that stuttering makes student life very difficult, as the country's educational system often fails to accommodate those who require additional time to articulate their thoughts.

They are part of the more than 600,000 adults in Nigeria who grapple with varying degrees of difficulty in speaking, manifesting as rapid eye blinks, tremors of the lips or jaw, facial tics, head jerks, and clenched fists. Individuals with speech difficulties have little to no control over these involuntary actions.

Additionally, their speech challenges intensify when they are tired or stressed — inevitable in higher education settings — and they contend with academic struggles almost daily because of the emphasis on verbal communication and peer interaction. In most courses, there is at least one group or individual assignment per semester that requires presentation and public speaking, which constitutes a significant portion (10 to 30 percent) of their overall grade.

Stammering does not only affect students while making presentations, however; reading can also be challenging, regardless of one’s level of education. Thirty-seven-year-old postgraduate student Ajayi Babajide, who is pursuing his master’s degree in business administration, recalls that during a class on managerial economics, the lecturer asked students to read a note aloud, one after the other, before he explained the lesson.

“As a stammerer, I find it difficult to enunciate words that begin with consonants. I was rehearsing how to pronounce the first word, which was a consonant, when the professor concluded that I was dumb.” Even though Ajayi had practised before his turn came, the lecturer assumed he couldn’t read the passage and decided to do it himself.

“There are barriers and stigma. Even when stammering has no physical imprint, most of us are ashamed, especially in the presence of strangers,” Akanbi-Neander says. His time as an undergraduate was, therefore, bittersweet: he emerged as the second-best student in his class and believes he could have topped the class if he did not stammer.

Instead of Nigerian society embracing stammerers and trying to understand their speech difficulties, he explains, it is either associated with a lack of intelligence or dismissed as a bad habit from childhood: “Some people even say that because we stammer, we are dishonest. So there is a cultural stigma attached to stammering.”

Jimoh, who decided to return to Ahmadu Bello University, says speaking at a slow pace has worked well for him: “I don’t speak too fast. My slow speech has given me enough respite to blend into the system.”

After endlessly searching for a job — he attributes the failure partly to stammering because it limited his choices and how prospective employers assessed him — Akanbi-Neander now runs his own business. “I stammer it out,” he says. “I ensure that I am knowledgeable beyond average. When people know I am knowledgeable, they will be eager to listen to me, even if it takes longer.”

Many people who stammer have a family history of the condition, which suggests that heredity is a factor.

Like Akanbi-Neander and Jimoh, Ajayi — who earned a bachelor’s degree in mass communication with a focus on advertising and minors in public relations, business administration, accounting, and music — has discovered methods to help him navigate his tertiary education journey.

At first, pursuing mass communication felt like a burden for Ajayi, though his family hoped it would help him overcome his stutter. Now, he is grateful that he did it — stammering has become a motivation for him, helping him reach new heights in his career. He has become an interdisciplinary expert and graduated from the MTN MUSON Music Scholars Programme, a rare achievement for anyone with a speech impediment.

Eunice Akinbode, a speech therapist currently pursuing graduate studies in speech therapy and audiology at the University of Ibadan, agrees that navigating Nigerian universities can be challenging for people with speech impediments. She believes it's crucial for educational stakeholders to recognize and address the struggles stammerers face. “From lecturers to students, every pillar of tertiary education is supposed to accommodate stammerers and their speech difficulties, as opposed to them finding adaptable ways on their own,” she says. “But we don’t have that here.”

Noting that stammering is “greatly overlooked,” Akinbode asserts that denying the existence of stammerers and neglecting the concerns of parents with children who stutter only exacerbates the issue. Of the 15 students Minority Africa interviewed for this article, 10 saw stammering as a personal woe; nothing too serious — but Akinbode says the Nigerian educational system has made it impossible for lecturers to go out of their way to carry students along. “Even the seemingly regular students hardly have the chance to thrive; how about people with special needs such as stammering? There’s no support for student stammerers in tertiary institutions whatsoever.”

“As speech therapists,” she added, “what we do for stammerers is [use] some techniques, including pacing, speech moderation, and control breathing, to work on their speech output. It’s only permissible for us to work on their psychology. A real-time educational fix is pretty difficult to find.”