Who's Smarter Now?

Did anyone watch the last edition of Who's Smarter Now on KTN?(Thur 18-01-07). I don't know about you but if you ask me, there are lots of not-so-smart questions being put to participants in that show.

The clincher was yesterday when the question meant for the home audience was so unsmartly framed as to imply that the Kenyan Maasai community supported terrorism, and specifically the infamous 9/11 attack on USA. How else would you explain the question: WHICH KENYAN COMMUNITY CONTRIBUTED CATTLE TOWARDS THE 9/11 ATTACKS ON THE U.S?

The boy who so heroically rallied his community to set aside part of their precious herd to help Americans in their hour of need could rightly sue for defamation.

A participant has as well been previously asked to give the common name for the Carribean countries south of the USA. I thought West Indies would be a smart enough answer to a quite dumb question but the presenter triumphantly called out: Latin America! when the buzzer went off with the hapless victor still unable to answer.

I will confess that history is not my strongest point, but isn't this programme misleading us when they claim again and again that South Africa was the last country to gain Independence in Africa? I stand to be corrected but I had a notion that South Africa was indeed the last coloniser in Africa, ruling over Namibia as late as the eighties and that what they attained in 1990 was majority rule, an end to the apartheid policy. Since the country was not ruled by another state but only an elitist white minority, the events of 1990 cannot be described as independence for the state, maybe for the blacks. As I said, am no historian and I stand to be corrected on this point.

There are many more goofs committed by Kenyan journalists and I hope this site will be a forum where I can share more gems and start a debate on this issue. Journalists have a duty to inform and entertain us but when they sleep on their job, it is only right that someone points it out.