President Uhuru Kenyatta speaks with the urgency, ire of the aggrieved

In the arts we appreciate both form and content. What you do is just as important as how you do it. Sometimes your style will even say more than what the substance is saying. Appreciation of this duality is as old as ancient antiquity. Aristotle (384 – 322 BC) elaborately discussed form and content in Rhetoric and in Poetics. And so when President Uhuru Kenyatta is giving his State of the Nation Address on Kenya’s 53rd Jamhuri Day, I cannot help drifting into both the form and content of his message.

His body gestures and movements, the cadence, timbre and nuanced inflections in his voice (especially the non conscious ones), the succession of facial expressions, the involuntary activities that the fingers do, the fumbling with the sheaf of papers that are his official address, as he ad libs – all these and many more little gradations of performance – are just as important as what he is labouring to say. And both the substance and style on this occasion speak to a troubled mind.