Dr Matiang’i, announce the date of Idd right away

For the fifth time in as many years, I want to advise the Cabinet Secretary in charge of the Ministry of Interior that there is no need to wait until June 12 in order to announce that the 15th will be a public holiday to commemorate the end of the Holy Month of Ramadhan – Idd-Ul-Fitr.

In short, if you can announce it three days in advance, you can also do so 3 weeks, or 3 months, or 3 years, or 3 decades, or 3 centuries ahead. Heck! I have even seen calendars on the internet showing the dates of this holiday going three millennia into the future!

How is this so? The answer is simple, the motions of the moon are very accurately known. The cycle from one full moon to the next takes 29 days, 12 hours, 44 minutes and 2.8769 seconds; +/- 0.0002 seconds!

This duration is so accurately known because the moon has been with us for a very long time – obviously! One doesn’t need very sophisticated equipment to get a precise measurement. In fact, you don’t need any apparatus at all! Your naked eye is enough.

All you do is count how many full moons appear over a long period of time, say, ten years. Then you divide this number by the days that have elapsed.

You will probably count just under 1,260 full moons in a ten-year period; each observed with a margin of error of about give-or-take one day. Thus, according to the science of measurements, your final answer will have an error of +/- 30 minutes.

In other words, if you used your 10-year average to predict the date of next year’s Idd-Ul-Fitr, you would be unlikely to miss it by more than 3 hours. But, with their sophisticated equipment, astronomers have given us the duration of the moon phases accurate to within two ten-thousandths of a second.

With this astronomic (not “astronomical”!) value, we can predict the date of the next Idd-Ul-Fitr with less that one second a margin of error. Why don’t we do that?

The conventional answer is that, the religious ceremonies can only happen after the crescent moon is physically sighted.

My reaction to that argument is this: even our current method of waiting till the last minute makes the declaration before the moon is sighted. Secondly, the date of the public holiday is a civil matter, not a religious consideration.

Therefore, if we are OK with announcing this date three days in advance, then we should have no problems announcing it one year ahead. Indeed, I should reiterate a point I made last year: the Public Holidays Act needs to be amended to state that these dates should be gazetted at least 12 months in advance.

www.figures.co.ke; @MungaiKihanya