Who, pray tell, are these ‘Senior CSs’ in the headline?

If you are a popular president, it is only natural for every nook and cranny of your republic to expect your frequent “presence”. Yet, according to one of Uhuru Kenyatta’s presidential aides, “We find this obsession with the presence of the President shocking to the point that he is not even expected to delegate his senior CSs.”

That is the question: How shocking? The answer: “To the point that he is not even expected to delegate his senior CSs.”

But what exactly do this presidential aide and The Standard newspaper find “shocking”? The answer: “This obsession with the presence of the President.”

That Kenyans are not supposed to be “obsessed” with the presence of their beloved Head of State and Government is not even the question.

The truly shocking point — according to our reporter and sub-editor — is that President Uhuru Kenyatta is not even expected to “delegate” certain functions to his “senior CSs”.

“Senior CSs”? What on earth are those (especially for readers who have just arrived for a tour of your lovely country)?

Even more “shocking” is that the newspaper concerned is a self-advertised public information instrument.

In the form of news items and spot or display adverts, information is supposed to be its stock-in-trade.

UNEQUALLED BEAUTY

Information is what it daily travels to the marketplace to sell. Yet you displayed one item which even I — a local consumer of news — simply would not have bought, namely, “senior CSs”. And the only reason I will not buy such an item is that you have failed to demystify it, for which reason, I do not know what it is.

For the question is inevitable. What information do you impart to a tourist newly arrived in Nairobi or Mombasa and to your subscriber in Alberta, Rangoon or Kamchatka whenever you face these with an item like “CSs”?

For the benefit of foreigners just arriving to regale themselves with the unequalled beauty of your country’s flora and fauna — for the benefit, moreover, of subscribers who cannot travel to Kenya — any abbreviation which outsiders are not likely to be familiar with must, on first mention, be immediately followed by the full name in brackets.

It is completely mindless and uninformative for a Nairobi or Mombasa or Kisumu newspaper with subscribers in Athens, Chicago, Land’s End, Lille, Los Angeles, Montevideo, Moscow, My Lai, Tokyo, Darwin and even Addis Ababa, Durban, Kinshasa, Lagos and Lusaka to speak casually of “Kanu”, “ODM”, “KPCU”, suchlike.

To do so is to completely mystify your “esteemed” readers.

Nay, it is to cheat them of their money. In a word, although, on your front page, you advertised yourself as a dealer in commodities known collectively as “information”, you failed to deliver that promise to all those who bought copies of your newspaper on that particular day.

If they are members of your legal environment, all you victims might even have taken you to a court of law to answer a charge of selling fake goods to an unsuspecting clientele.

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