Anon-governmental organisation, Book The Kids Again (BKA), has called for the return of reading culture in the country.
The founder of the NGO, Goodluck Godwin Hayi, made the call yesterday in Abuja at programe with the theme: “Innovative Strategies For Promoting Reading Culture Among the Youths in Nigeria.”
He said reading exercises the brain and makes people know about their environments help plan better. He added that the idea of BKA was to bring communities together with a voice to restore reading passion in society.
Hayi said, “When we were growing up, we listened to our parents’ different folk tales with great insights, now documented and brought back to us as books to read. But with the advent of phone tabs and games, our kids no longer have interest in reading high content valuable books that can help reshape their ideology besides reading to pass examinations.”
He urged writers to put the interest of the people at heart when writing, by going back to the people to find out what interests them most and work on such interests to encourage them to read books.
“Our needs are not static, they change from time to time, hence we need writers to write more on our environmental issues, especially on our day-to-day activities to attract the people to read.
“There are NGOs that provide books in public places for people to have access to read and return, due to the financial constraints in buying some of the books, which is not enough, I think what we need to encourage more people to read, government should subsidise books for easy accessibility and to reach more people,” he added.
Humanitarian facility manager, author and poet, Jamila Abbas Muhammad, said the first thing to consider to get the youth to read more is to buy into their curiosity on what they need and invest heavily in story-telling to empower writers on indigenous fascinating stories that can create excitement.
She said, “We have so much here in the country that we need to build on, which is telling our own stories to inform, build and create awareness on happenings in our environment and society at large. Majority of the Nigerian population is not educated, hence we need to consider translating some of these books into our indigenous languages to enable those who cannot read English do so in their different dialects to meet up with the global nitch.”
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