COLUMNIST PHILLIP OCHIENG IS NOT TOO HAPPY WITH KENYAN JOURNALISTS

Columnist Philip Ochieng has accused Kenyan journalists of failing to master the English language while hiding under self-defeating excuses, in a sad newspaper commentary that is raising concerns over whether he is willing to continue writing his weekly piece correcting language mistakes in the media.

He is damn right.
Ochieng, an accomplished editor of many years and an expert in English language, berated journalists, especially in print media, whom he said had failed to even understand the basic rules of ”articles” in the English language.
”I am perpetually frustrated that, despite my efforts to correct specific mistakes, those mistakes recur with even greater speed,” Ochieng wrote on February 18 in the Saturday Nation newspaper, where he writes a regular weekend piece pointing out mistakes and corrections in the news media.
”In our media, this is increasingly manifest though, for instance, the daily ignorance of a part of speech called ‘articles’. In English, they are two, ‘the’ and the indefinite, ‘a’,” he wrote, in an uncharacteristically hash indictment of the Kenyan media.
”As a reporter or sub-editor, please remember that what you are working for is an English-language medium. I do not buy the self-defeatism with which we habitually explain away our mediocrity in English: ‘Oh, it is not my mother tongue”’, he wrote.
Ochieng emphasized that it was possible to master English even if you are not native English.