I must admit that my command of the Queen's English is not as robust as it was when I departed from Machakos School's hallowed campus in 1996; despite my best efforts, it has deteriorated to such a state that I am afraid of engaging, especially using the spoken word, with my peers and seniors. However, and as we hurtle towards another end-of-year, I feel it is my duty to bring to your attention the sad state of English-language communication in that most popular medium, the 9 O'clock news bulletin.
My unscientific, certainly biased ranking, places the K24's "The Big Story" and KBC Channel One's "9 O'clock News" at the bottom of the list, which is jointly led by Citizen TV and KTN. For a nation that declares English to be one of it's national and official languages, it is shocking how poor our command of this international language is. TV newscasters' command of the language is so atrocious one wonders how they got their jobs in the first place. Take, for instance, John Kago of KBC Channel One; he is yet to meet a punctuation mark he could not ignore. Listening to him will drive you to distraction as you attempt to keep track of the multiple story lines he may be pursuing at any one time. His frequent co-anchor, Njambi Koikai, seems to follow where he leads. Perhaps her time in the FM radio world (where she apparently hosted a reggae programme - reggae-listeners not known for their discipline when it comes to sentence structure, grammar or syntax) must have instilled in her a certain laissez faire approach to the use and misuse of the Queen's English. Her daring employment of imagery usually ends in bitter disappointment for what must be her legions of TV viewers, or else how do you explain her continued employment at the government's media outlet of choice?
MediaMax's K24 has certainly come a long way from its humble origins, joining the big boys as one of the permanent members of the arguably illustrious DSTV stable of domestic news channels. You would not know this listening to night after night of poor grammar and mangled syntax. The Big Story's anchors' command of the English language is proof positive that if these men and women ever saw the inside of a media studies' college, they must have been dead asleep when language was being taught. Their caption-writers, however, take the biscuit; reading the captions to ascertain the state of affairs in Kenya is akin to reading tea leaves to predict the future. One is left with the distinct impression that the captions are written by a thousand monkeys with type-writers.
How is it that once Kenyans are released from the confines of their various secondary schools they seem to lose all interest in improving their communication skills? Time and again, you will meet apparently college-educated or university-educated Kenyans and, one minute into a conversation, you are unable to decide whether they are playing a prank on you or are dead serious in the manner that they express themselves. It cannot be that all those language lecturers in colleges and universities are simply phoning in their lectures, can it? Perhaps these young men and women feel that they owe no duty to themselves or their interlocutors to speak clearly or speak properly. Perhaps, the freedom they enjoy from the unremitting, tyrannical thumbs of their parents and teachers has also freed them from the responsibilities and, dare I mention it, the joy of being able to manipulate one of the most beautifully expressive languages of all time. (My apologies to the users of the French and German languages.)
Public communication is in a state of crisis. It is impossible to listen to public figures who constantly and egregiously mangle the English language without a twinge of sorrow. It is in such a state that chaos reigns and confusion marks the state of public discourse. If we are unable to communicate clearly, then we are unable to be effective; if we are ineffective in passing on our ideas, we are at risk of actual physical combat. Change must come to the users of public airwaves if only to ensure that the media's mandate to educate, inform and entertain is achieved.
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