‘Nation’ headline writer committed grammatical error

The lead headline on page 22 of the Daily Nation number of August 21, 2019, asserted as follows: “State commitment in Mau forest saga questioned after prosecutions halted”. Singly, of course, all those are English words. But strung together in that fashion, they amount to a usage that is remarkably not part of the language of England.

TYRANNICAL

While drafting that headline, a subeditor was apparently trying to say that, earlier still, somebody had doubted whether whoever had committed the act had been serious about protecting Kenya’s globally celebrated Mau greenery. For one reason alone, such a doubt will have invaded the minds of all intelligent human beings after they had read the newspaper’s version of the story.

For part of the forest’s significance is that it is globally celebrated, and it annually attracts into Kenya’s Treasury very handsome convertible international cash from such rich global sections of the human world as Sino-Japan, Western Europe and North America, including through the international human traffic known in English as tourism.

By each appointing a ministry called “Tourism”, Kenya and other East African and Third World governments officially announce that they recognise tourism as a source of serious internationally available cash. Into the bargain, the cash is, as it were, convertible worldwide. To stress that point, the incoming money is easy to convert into practically all other internationally important monetary systems, including the psychologically tyrannical “greenback” of the United States of America.

UGLY MANNER

If you note the words “world monetary systems”, they might remind you that the idea can then be rephrased, much more warmly, as cash that can, for local use, be instantaneously converted the whole world over. The term would then come to refer to any such currency as can be used in practically all human countries.

By an official international agreement, human beings might one day invent such a currency. Those with any proper knowledge of the language of England ought to know, too, that, though English is, at root, merely ethnic (German), history has raised that language to a very high level where it can serve also as a greatly effective tool of inter-ethnic entente the whole world over.

For, although the language of England was universalised in an extraordinarily ugly manner, namely, through a system of race-based brutalism, including colonialism and slave trade, inflicted with abuse, cruelty, economic inhumanity and trade in black human beings – my guess is that such a meaning was not what the writer of the Nation’s headline had conceived in his or her mind.

In the first place, to commit is one of the several possible verbs that you can derive from both nouns commitment and commission.

SOCIA-SOCIAL

However, only then will the intelligent teacher ask his or her wards to affirm it through their dictionaries. In the process, the learners are likely to discover that the two nouns, commission and commitment, do not mean the same thing.

They will soon discover that commitment is an abstract noun, whereas the noun commission, though also sometimes abstract, may often refer to a concrete thing – like a body of human beings officially appointed to study a particular national or international socio-social problem.

For, although all the human governments have terribly cheapened the term “commission”, it may refer to any committee officially appointed to study such a social problem and suggest how to solve it in a really humane and cost-effective manner.

Into the bargain, such a commission might even suggest an admirably cost-effective solution to the problem at hand. Indeed, the UN has such commissions — like Unicef and Unesco.

Philip Ochieng is a veteran journalist