UK disowns document, cites grammatical errors

By David Ochami

United Kingdom’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office has denounced documents tabled by politicians allied to G7 in Parliament claiming Britain was pressurising ICC to detain Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto.

Britain said in a short statement that these documents "are not genuine. Evidence of this includes both the misleading and implausible content and the plethora of spelling and grammatical mistakes."

The Standard On Saturday has, independently, analysed the alleged dossier and discovered the many errors which, according to ODM Secretary General Anyang’ Nyong’o expose the handiwork of an amateur.

The documents are "patently forged" according to Nyong’o in a statement issued last evening.

Britain has said contrary to claims in the ‘dossier’ they are neither partisan nor interested in any "particular outcome" in the next elections.

Britain has accused authors of the documents and its purveyors of running on a "unscrupulous agenda" that cannot sour relations between the two nations.

"We are concerned that this is a smear campaign which aims to destabilise our bilateral relations and to damage the political atmosphere ahead of the Kenyan elections."

Meanwhile, a casual inspection of the dossier exposes grammatical and spelling errors that raise doubts about the author’s command of English (British) and state of mind at the time of writing leading to a probability many parts of the document are contrived.

Some paragraphs exhibit anecdotal evidence that they were superimposed on genuine documents and official logos added to confer an aura of genius or that more than one writer was involved in the writing due to inconsistency in diction, logic and flow.

The mistakes are too repetitive to ignore or pass off as acceptable in ordinary discourse for a native speaker of English. The mistakes in the "dossier" demonstrate, either a writer in a hurry or one with problems with the Queen’s language.

The first mistake is on page one, where the spelling of ‘diminish’ is given as ‘deminish’ and the second sentence saying: ‘This may be possible with Raila Presidency.’ The correct grammar would be either ‘This may be possible with a Raila presidency’ or ‘This may be possible with Raila as president.’

Another mistake is on page two: ‘Now that the two suspects have stepped aside, but still influencial in relevant government (offices)’. Notice the lack of the auxiliary verb ‘are’ between but and still. Readers should also notice the wrong spelling of the word influential.

Notice that on page two the author gets the spelling of the word influential wrong but gets it right in annex A raising the possibility that the paragraph with the new word ‘influencial’ could have been superimposed.

Throughout the page 15 narrative the author refers to the Prime Minister as "Mr Odinga" several times but on page 1 ‘Chloe’ suddenly talks about "Raila Presidency". The most probably phrase, arising out of consistence would be "an Odinga Presidency."

On page three the author, while speaking about the presidential bid of Uhuru Kenyatta misspells the word ‘and’ as ‘an’. On the same page lies an egregious mistake of grammar whereby the author talks about "this appointments" instead of "these appointments".

Page three has a sentence that reads: "Neither the EU nor the US have not formed a position on these questions," which makes no grammatical sense. In the text of the story there is a word spelt at ‘imprtant’. Most likely the writer intended to write ‘important’ but lapsed midstream.

And the mistakes went on and on.