“Hiyo ni ngumu sana” President struggles to pronounce word in his speech

The president had a moment of hesitation as he read his speech for the past Mashujaa day trying to pronounce a word. The speech writer had included a vocabulary that had the head of state struggling to understand and make meaning of and thus opted to brush it off.

“Our unity is not complete: we remain divided by ethnicity; the faults of the past still haunt us; and our politics, as we have seen today, is too… hiyo ngumu sana,”

It has now been revealed that the word was vitriolic which even going by the sentence flow points at the hatred and divisive nature of the Kenyan politics. The statement caught everyone by surprise considering the president had previously been hailed as eloquent and calm when giving speeches. He also went to prestigious schools in Kenya and abroad in St Mary’s School Nairobi and Amherst College in the US.

More than that, the president’s hiccup highlighted a more serious issue. Unlike leaders in the western world who go through their speeches along with the speech writer, it appears our leaders just red what has been presented to them verbatim on the material day.

This explains why the president struggled with his speech and why our leaders sound unnatural and boring when delivering their written speeches. It also accounts for why they usually veer off the subject of their speeches when they switch to delivering speeches without a script.

Here is that short clip as the president proved even years of reading speeches cannot act as proper preparation for reading a written speech on the material day.

Uhuru Kenyatta's pronunciation struggles