The English language is not the mother tongue of any African country. The language should not be used to measure the intelligence of Africans. Africans that are good at the English language should be applauded. Africans that are not good at the language should not be mocked. After all, nobody of the English race has been mocked for not being good at all in any African language.

However, Africans, especially the citizens of African countries that have the English language as their lingua franca, should not give up on striving to be better at the language. Learning is continuous process. Also, nobody is perfect. But the strive should not be detrimental to African indigenous languages.

I want to address a post I saw a few days ago on the front page of Nairaland. The post asks for an explanation to a particular sentence. The sentence is, "A mother slapped her daughter because she was drunk".

The sentence is erroneous. But people, instead of pointing out the error, considered the sentence correct and have been trying to explain its meaning. With this, I just realised that the English problem in Africa is bigger than I thought.

You may ask what is the error in the sentence. Let me answer the question. The sentence is ambiguous. An ambiguous sentences is a sentence that can accept two or more contradictory interpretations. Such a sentence may be grammatically and technically correct but is considered erroneous because it can lead to fallacy. Since "mother" and "daughter" share the same pronoun which is "she", the pronoun should not have been used in the sentence.

When two nouns that share the same pronoun are needed in one sentence and one of them is to be repeated in the sentence, the pronoun is not used. But when the two nouns are to be repeated in the sentence, one must be maintained and the other is either replaced with the pronoun or maintained as well. See examples below.

When two nouns with the same pronoun appear in one sentence and only one of the nouns is repeated:
"Mary slapped Joy and Joy cried."

When the two nouns are repeatedly used in the same sentence:
"Mary and Joy ended their friendship because Joy betrayed Mary."
"Mary and Joy ended their friendship because Joy betrayed her."

In this second sentence, it is clear that "her" represents Mary since betrayal as an action is performed by Joy. If you replace "her" with "herself", herself will clearly represent Joy, meaning that Joy betrayed herself, not Mary. "Mary and Joy ended their friendship because Joy betrayed herself."

It is when two nouns used repeatedly in one sentence do not share the same pronoun that you should replace each noun with its pronoun during the second appearance of each noun in the sentence. Example: "Peter and Joy ended their friendship because she betrayed him."

The sentence about a mother and her daughter is misleading. "she" could be the mother or the daughter. So, saying that the mother was drunk is correct, and saying that the daughter was drunk is aslo correct. Maybe the daughter is underage and didn't take alcohol but was slapped by her drunk mother. Maybe the daughter got drunk and was consequently slapped by her mother. The sentence is clearly ambiguous.

The correct forms of the sentence are:
1.
"A mother slapped her daughter because the daughter was drunk."

2.
"A mother slapped her daughter because the mother was drunk."

None of the two sentences above is ambiguous. The first example clearly shows that the mother is not drunk. The second example shows that the daughter is not drunk.