Passaris, you don’t have to speak

Some people can’t resist the urge to speak when a camera or microphone is thrust in their faces. But sometimes it may be better for everyone if they didn't say anything.

Consider Esther Passaris, the eager, self-assured Nairobi “businesswoman” who wants the unfortunately titled seat of woman representative.

Passaris had aimed for the Nairobi governor’s seat before it probably dawned on her that she was getting a bit too ambitious. Or maybe, to draw media and public attention, she had the genius to proclaim her interest in the seat now held by Evans Kidero while all along aiming for the parliamentary seat.

Whatever the case, Passaris was on Monday declared winner of the Nairobi ODM nominations for woman rep in an election tainted by typical Orange party anarchy and claims of vote theft.

HEIGHT OF EUPHORIA

She drew a staggering 65,104 votes against the 11,296 polled by her closest rival, Beatrice Kwamboka, a thirty-something (we are told) elected Nairobi County MCA that few people have ever heard of who, unlike Passaris, according to a Nairobi News reporter, had refused to embrace social media as part of her nomination campaign.

Amid the euphoria of receiving the party’s nomination certificate, Passaris blurted out a sentence that she might have regretted later once she had climbed down from her excitement.

“I don’t want to focus on government revenue for woman representative position, I want to use the people themselves to get themselves empowered,” a reporter for Nation.co.ke quoted her saying.

Did she really say that? Salaries are called “revenue” from the government in Passaris’s world? And how do you “use” people to get them “empowered”?

QUOTED VERBATIM

Copy editors processing the story for publication wondered whether Passaris’s words had been spoken in a different language before being translated into the bad English that itself needed to be translated.

Upon inquiring, we were assured that the aspiring woman rep had indeed been quoted verbatim, and she was speaking in English.

The quote was later rendered as, “I don’t want to focus on [the pay I will get for the] woman representative position, I want to help the people to empower themselves.”

But another well-meaning copy editor going through the article removed the square brackets that were meant to indicate that the enclosed words were the first editor’s insertion that reflected his reading of the speaker’s intended meaning.

Too much trouble. It would have been better for everyone if Passaris had not spoken the words at all.