No, a former employee just can’t be sacked
An English teacher looks over assignments of her Standard Three pupils at Kawangware Primary School on October 5, 2015. In the context in which England and the English-speaking world now use it, the word former is completely mystifying. PHOTO | GERALD ANDERSON | NATION MEDIA GROUP
What you need to know:
- Yet, in normal circumstances, it is impossible to sack former employees. Logic simply does not allow it.
- It is also used to identify the first of any two mentioned items, where the second is called “the latter”.
The English adjective former means belonging to or taking place in an earlier time.
If so, what could the newspaper mean when it reported that President Kenyatta had sacked “the former Cabinet Secretary, Ms Anne Waiguru”?
That is the question: How is it possible for anybody to sack any former office holder?
That Ms Waiguru has been shown the red card is a public truth.
That she is an immediate former Cabinet secretary, there is no denying.
What is appalling is only the language in which our newspapers habitually put such phenomena.
For the truth is that, up to the minute when she received her marching order, Ms Waiguru was the person in charge of a certain cabinet docket.
She was not yet a or the former Cabinet secretary.
Indeed, she remained in the Cabinet till the last second of the time she had been given to pack up her personal things in the office.
Yet, in normal circumstances, it is impossible to sack former employees. Logic simply does not allow it.
For former employees are already far too “former” to be sacked.
No, you can sack only present or substantive employees.
ENIGMATIC WORD
You cannot sack former ones because these are long gone and are no longer yours for dismissal.
But, in our country of countries, the relevant logic has long ago gone completely haywire.
According to our reporters and sub-editors, former employees are being dismissed all the time.
The question, indeed, is: Why not? Why can’t it be done, especially in a country where the roll of electors is reported to contain the names of millions and millions of human beings who walked the earth with the likes of Methuselah?
Why not, in a country where the register of voters has the names of hundreds of thousands of individuals who have been dead ever since a meteoric event condemned the ilk of the dinosaur to everlasting extinction; of individuals who, because they are deader than a dodo, never heard of the Mesopotamian Flood?
Is that perhaps why English describes such individuals as former?
Is it because everything else existing in our universe has been formed from their dead bodies?
I do not claim to know. In the context in which England and the English-speaking world now use it, the word former is completely mystifying.
ANOTHER USE
It is also used to identify the first of any two mentioned items, where the second is called “the latter”.
In a list composed, say, of William and Mary, William is the former and Mary is the latter – perhaps because, in terms of temporal sequence, the word latter (with a double “t”) can be traced to the word later (with a single “t”).
But former is also possible as a noun.
Here the former is the person responsible for giving shape and “spirit” to one or many items.
All the three theistic religions — Judaism, Christianity and Islam — assert that God is the former, that is to say, the creator of everything that exists in reality.
