Sonko party ‘SINGLE MOST BIGGEST’ threat to Kalonzo’s Wiper in Ukambani

What you need to know:

It’s not uncommon to come across a text from some otherwise educated individuals, including college graduates, who have jotted down, e.g. names of people, cities and countries, (proper nouns), starting with a small letter!

Dar es Salaam. We’ll open the 2026 inaugural article with our favourite peeve: concern over lack of punctuation sense amongst our people. And professional scribblers aren’t an exception.

I share WhatsApp and other social media platforms in which we note some subscribers posing a question without using the question mark at the end of their sentence.

Why should you write an exclamatory expression—or one that show strong feeling, excitement or surprise—without bothering to use the exclamation mark (!), also known as exclamation point?

It’s not uncommon to come across a text from some otherwise educated individuals, including college graduates, who have jotted down, e.g. names of people, cities and countries, (proper nouns), starting with a small letter!

Such people are seemingly clueless about the use of key punctuation marks such as the full stop/period (.), comma (,), semi-colon (;), colon (:), ellipses (…) and dash (—).

Check out all this and more in your smart phone (google it) or your standard dictionary and enlighten yourself further on punctuation. If you ask us, we’ll say this: careful application of punctuation rules—which include proper use of small and capital letters in a text—is one of the practices that draw the line between the literate and the semi-literate.

Having thus lectured (bah!) let’s now move to dish out linguistic gems we recently stumbled on. Here we go…

We’ve before us a copy of the massive Nairobi tabloid that commands a sizeable readership in Bongo (Sunday, December 14, 2025 edition), entitled, ‘Puzzle of hawker’s fake carjacking report to the police.’

The intro reads: “A 58-year-old electrical equipment hawker, whose relatives reside in Britain, was on Thursday charged with lying to the police that his motor vehicle has been ROBBED at gunpoint by several gangsters.”

A hawker’s vehicle has been robbed? Oh, nope! It’s the hawker who HAS BEEN robbed OF HIS vehicle. We’ll say it here as we’ve done a zillion times before: criminals don’t rob things, rather, they rob victims of their things.

Page 10 of the tabloid has a story whose headline reads: ‘Why Sonko’s new party is rattling Kalonzo’s Wiper,’ and therein, a Wiper party member is quoted as purportedly saying: “The Sonko party, completely mimicking the older sky blue Wiper colours is the SINGLE MOST BIGGEST threat to our Wiper Party especially in Ukambani stronghold and here in Nairobi.”

Single most biggest…? This is even beneath our kind of English, a mishmash of a three-word expression that means absolutely nothing! It would be acceptable if our Nairobi scribbling colleague wrote: “…it’s the single BIG threat. Or, simply, “…it’s the biggest threat…”

Let’s get back home and take a look at Bongo’s senior-most broadsheet of Saturday, December 27, which has a story on Page 1 whose headline reads, ‘PSSN III targets over 500,000 households.’ It’s a news article based on what was recently said by the Minister of State in the President’s Office (Public Service Management and Good Governance), Mr Ridhiwani Kikwete.

In Para 3, the scribbler moves to quote what the minister expressed in a press briefing: “Based on available sources, PSSN III will target about 575,000 of the most vulnerable households …” Mr Ridhiwani said.

You refer to the minister as Mr Ridhiwani? Wrong! The honourable minister, when not addressing him in his full name (Ridhiwani Kikwete), etiquette demands that we call him Mr Kikwete. That’s his surname.

If you’re wary of calling him Mr Kikwete lest people assume you’re referring to the minister’s more renowned father, former president Jakaya Kikwete, then simply call him Ridhiwani, not Mr Ridhiwani.

But that would probably be seen as being disrespectful, thanks to the etiquette system we (blindly?) borrowed from our former colonial lords whose language, English, we consider most important (bah!).

Ah, this treacherous language called English!