OUR KIND OF ENGLISH: Minister gives ‘hopes’ dispute will be ‘concluded’

In the Fri, Feb 7 edition of the tabloid closely associated with this columnist, there’s a story entitled, ‘PM, Mbowe lock horns over political rallies, electoral body’. Attributing his report to Chadema boss Freeman Mbowe, the scribbler writes in Para 3:

“He also sought to know what plans were in place for the establishment of an independent NEC ahead of the general ELECTIONS.”

For the nth time, let’s reiterate: What’s takes place in Bongo every five years is a general ELECTION. General, in the sense that we conduct three different elections at a go—civic, parliamentary and presidential!

In Para 8, our colleague writes: “Responding, Mr Majaliwa said…procedures have to be followed to make sure rallies are conducted in proper MANNERS.”

In proper manners? Nope, we say “in A PROPER MANNER. The word “manners” means something else—adabu in Kiswahili (a rather strong, pejorative word), while “a proper manner” refers to what the PM message was: in a proper way. Kwa mujibu wa taratibu.

On page 19 of the same edition, there’s this story, ‘T-bills oversubscribed despite OF reduced yields’.

Oops! The word “despite” is a preposition that takes a noun as its object, and it doesn’t require OF. The headline scribbler must have confused it with “in spite OF…” which bears the same meaning. In which case we’d have, ‘T-bills oversubscribed IN SPITE OF reduced yields’.

Further on in her story, the scribbler, purporting to quote a financial expert, writes: “So, the 182-DAYS paper bid was not successful because central BANKS WANTS to reduce the costs incurred from floated bills.”

There’re factual and grammatical issues here. In Bongo (as it’s the case in other countries) we’ve only one central bank, which we call the Bank of Tanzania (BoT). And then, even if they were many, we would say “central banks WANT (not wants) to..!”

Come Sat, Feb 8, and Page 2 of Bongo’s senior-most broadsheet had this story from Zenj, entitled, ‘FBME clients told to remain patient’. Reporting about what the Isles’ Finance and Planning Minister told the House of Reps, our scribbling colleague wrote:

“Minister Ramia gave HOPES that the case is almost coming to an end and once the dispute is CONCLUDED, the BANK depositors will be paid…”

We’ll just offer a rewrite without fussing, and this is it: “Minister Ramia gave the HOPE that the case is almost coming to an end and once the dispute is RESOLVED, the BANK’s depositors will be paid…”

And finally, a look at Page 2 of Bongo’s huge and colourful broadsheet of Wed, Feb 12, where there’s a story entitled, ‘PM directs NHC to collect all debts’. In this one, the scribbler says in the intro:

“PM Kassim Majaliwa has directed the board of directors of the NHC to ensure that it collects all the debts from its tenants…He gave the DIRECTIVES in Dar es Salaam yesterday…”

Gave the directives..? Nope; he gave THE DIRECTIVE yesterday…

Ah, this treacherous language called English!