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President Ruto addresses residents at Ol Kalou town in Nyandarua county, April 3, 2025. [Kipsang Joseph, Standard]
Only days after hailing Kenyans’ proficiency in the English language, Prezzo Bill Ruto is off to Tanzania’s administrative capital of Dodoma to offer English tutorials to the nation’s Parliament.
Since making his snide remarks about Nigerians’ purported incomprehension when they speak their variety of English, necessitating a “translator,” Prezzo Ruto will be the first Head of State from Kenya to offer such instruction to Tanzania’s Parliament.
“Charity must begin at home,” said a source at State House in Nairobi. “As the last frontier in defence of the English Empire, we are embarrassed that most Tanzanians don’t just speak bad English, they don’t speak any at all. They have maintained their insistence on the promotion of Swahili.”
Tanzania’s independent government under Julius Nyerere swiftly dismantled European cultural hegemonies by promoting Swahili as the nation’s lingua franca, while rejecting Western capitalist economic models in favour of “Ujamaa,” which fused egalitarian African values with Maoist principles.
Kenya, which declared its independence from Britain in December 1963, remains in the grip of its former colonial masters. It’s a strategic gateway into the continent. The British government also maintains military training bases in Kenya’s northern frontier, where soldiers routinely maim locals from unexploded ordinance, or rape and defile local women.
While Prezzo Ruto has repeatedly embarrassed his nation with erratic foreign policies, including the questionable deployment of Kenyan troops, at the behest of the Americans, to Haiti, the earliest black republic in history, his unashamed promotion of English cultural hegemony revealed a higher level of ignorance.
“It’s hard to believe that this came from an African, admonishing fellow Africans for not speaking their colonial masters’ language well enough. It makes nonsense of the life-long efforts of Ngugi wa Thiong’o, the departed Kenyan intellectual, to decolonise the minds of his country and continent,” said a cultural critic based in Nairobi.
Interestingly, Prezzo Ruto’s predecessors, Uhuru Kenyatta, son of the founding Prezzo Jomo Kenyatta, and the one before him, Mwai Kibaki, both of whom studied in Western academies, swiftly moved East to liberate their nation from the clutches of Western institutions like the IMF and the World Bank.
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President Ruto address
es residents at Ol Kalou town in Nyandarua county
, April 3, 2025.
[Kipsang Joseph, Standard]
Only days after hailing Kenyans’ proficiency in the English language, Prezzo Bill Ruto is off to Tanzania’s administrative capital of Dodoma to offer English tutorials to the nation’s Parliament.
Since making his snide remarks about Nigerians’ purported incomprehension when they speak their variety of English, necessitating a “translator,” Prezzo Ruto will be the first Head of State from Kenya to offer such instruction to Tanzania’s Parliament.
“Charity must begin at home,” said a source at State House in Nairobi. “As the last frontier in defence of the English Empire, we are embarrassed that most Tanzanians don’t just speak bad English, they don’t speak any at all. They have maintained their insistence on the promotion of Swahili.”
Tanzania’s independent government under Julius Nyerere swiftly dismantled European cultural hegemonies by promoting Swahili as the nation’s lingua franca, while rejecting Western capitalist economic models in favour of “Ujamaa,” which fused egalitarian African values with Maoist principles.
Kenya, which declared its independence from Britain in December 1963, remains in the grip of its former colonial masters. It’s a strategic gateway into the continent. The British government also maintains military training bases in Kenya’s northern frontier, where soldiers routinely maim locals from unexploded ordinance, or rape and defile local women.
While Prezzo Ruto has repeatedly embarrassed his nation with erratic foreign policies, including the questionable deployment of Kenyan troops, at the behest of the Americans, to Haiti, the earliest black republic in history, his unashamed promotion of English cultural hegemony revealed a higher level of ignorance.
“It’s hard to believe that this came from an African, admonishing fellow Africans for not speaking their colonial masters’ language well enough. It makes nonsense of the life-long efforts of Ngugi wa Thiong’o, the departed Kenyan intellectual, to decolonise the minds of his country and continent,” said a cultural critic based in Nairobi.
Interestingly, Prezzo Ruto’s predecessors, Uhuru Kenyatta, son of the founding Prezzo Jomo Kenyatta, and the one before him, Mwai Kibaki, both of whom studied in Western academies, swiftly moved East to liberate their nation from the clutches of Western institutions like the IMF and the World Bank.
By Peter Kimani