Are these Kenya’s most misused words?

Around here, nothing is ever what it is said to be. That’s why every eatery claims to sell ‘fish and chips’ yet the cook would mistake tilapia for a snake.

So you have a clown walking around calling himself pastor, evangelist, Dr, prophet, apostle. But beneath the colourful rob lies a charlatan and fornicator that would put both Jezebel and the Biblical tax collector to shame.

‘consultant’

Then you have ‘teacher’. In all honesty, some people should be shot for claiming to be teachers. The thing that a teacher does is to ‘teach’. Reading notes from a text book for school kids (and university students) to copy in exercise books is not teaching. Even class eight dropouts can do that.

And what is this about every Joe claiming to be an ‘expert or consultant’? Look, the fact that you have PhD does not make you an ‘expert’.

When you do a bit of spanner work for an NGO or two, it does not make you a ‘consultant’.

Ten years ago, I was on some course that was run by two mzungu ‘consultants’ – actually very bright guys, botanists with PhDs. But everyone was in agreement that the real expert was a Form Two dropout who knew every single indigenous plant species along the East African coast!

school dropout

The rest of us who were purporting to be ‘consultants’ and ‘experts’ ended up looking like school dropouts. Thus, although I work for a media house, I don’t consider myself to be a journalist. People like Kipkoech Tanui, Juma Kwayera, Wahome Thuku, Oscar Obonyo, now these are journalists.

It would be criminal for a clown like myself who cracks silly jokes for a living to tell people ‘I am a journalist’. Which is why you might want to really think hard before you say, “I am a blogger’. If three people read your blog, then you are not a blogger, just a nice, creative guy talking to himself.

Because I am not allowed to spread hate speech, I shall say nothing about ‘honourabl