This ministry can’t make up its mind

What exactly is going on at the Ministry of Education? Even before the dust settles on that incomprehensible scam involving Free Primary School Education funds, someone is tinkering with Kiswahili, the language that Kenyans like to pretend is their national lingo.

As it is, few Kenyan leaders can hold sway or even make sense in their national language. The few who can are either from the coast where Kiswahili is practically a mother tongue or they have had to hire tutors in old age to polish up their misamiati.

It’s a fact that Gideon Moi and Raila Odinga are much more eloquent in Kiswahili now than they were a decade ago, a pointer to burning the midnight oil reading nursery school Swahili rhymes. Otherwise highly articulate individuals like Anyang Nyong’o and James Orengo are reduced to a stutter when they speak in this national tongue because they went to school when Kiswahili was not compulsory at elementary level.

To make matters worse, there is a generation of youth that have severe difficulties communicating in standard Kiswahili, courtesy of that mongrel of a language called Sheng — Kiswahili currently being compulsory in primary school notwithstanding.

The biggest irony is that meanwhile; the Committee of Experts thinks Kiswahili should be elevated to an Official language. Official? When no one can speak or write it?