Kiswahili has been accepted for use as an official language in Uganda, and the cabinet has also ordered that it be declared a required subject in both primary and secondary schools.
In order to oversee the adoption of Kiswahili as the second national (official) language, the government established the Uganda National Kiswahili Council in 2019.
According to Uganda, the Cabinet’s decision is in keeping with the instruction of the 21st East African Community (EAC) Summit, which was held in February 2021 and commanded the expedition of the implementation of Kiswahili, English, and French as the bloc’s official languages.
“Cabinet recommended that the teaching of Kiswahili language in primary and secondary should be made compulsory and examinable. It was also further agreed that training programmes for Parliament, Cabinet and the media be initiated,” a statement, released Tuesday, on the Cabinet resolutions read.
English has been Uganda’s only official language since independence in 1962. Kiswahili was proposed as the second official language in 2005 but is only taught as an optional subject in secondary schools since 2017.
While Kiswahili is the region’s lingua franca, spoken extensively in Tanzania as both national and official language, it was adopted as the official language of the EAC in 2017. EAC member states are Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, South Sudan and most recently the Democratic Republic of Congo.
In Kenya, Kiswahili has been the national language since 1964 and is official since 2010. Burundi made Kiswahili a compulsory subject from primary school level in 2007, while Rwanda adopted it as an official language in 2017.
Kiswahili is the most spoken African language on the continent from southern Somalia, eastern DRC, Malawi, Zambia, Mozambique, and the Comoros Islands to South Sudan. The African Union made it an official language in 2004, in addition to English, Portuguese, Arabic, and French.
The Southern African Development Community (SADC), of which Tanzania is a member, adopted Kiswahili as its fourth official language in 2019 in addition to English, Portuguese and French.
