Who wants to sit through a two-hour movie where the drama is in a language he doesn’t understand? If the movie is in Chinese, which is bad enough in Nairobi, there will be English subtitles. It’s double work watching that kind of movie, but at least viewers are taken into account. They follow through. The same can’t be said of how our TV and radio stations have treated non-Swahili speakers in this country for decades.

Forget a two-hour movie. A good number of urban dwellers in the country have gone through a near lifetime with people around them talking things they have a right to understand in languages they don’t understand. It is a most disconcerting situation.

Take this week, for example, when all eyes have been on the budget. Our news channels pulled a great show. Beginning with pre-budget analyses, through MPs’ perennial dozing in parliament as the Finance minister reads what should be the most important speech of the year, to post-budget interviews among Kenyans, it was commendable coverage. Particularly when reporters engaged Kenyans on city sidewalks. The camera even went out to the suburbs and the countryside, in search of real people on the ground.

That is how NTV carried two powerful stories Wednesday evening from Mathare, the country’s most notorious slum in the city’s northern outskirts. The channel told the story of a woman who has sold vegetables for decades. Important-looking men in pin-stripped ties were all over town celebrating a poor-man’s budget. Yet none of it made sense to this woman. She held in her hands a bunch of sukuma wiki and told how she used to buy a bunch of the country’s legendary vegetable for as little as Sh2 and sell at Sh5. She raked in over 100 per cent in profits. And life was good. Now, even if she tried to cut even, her sukuma wiki stayed an entire day in the stalls, untouched. People simply had no money.

Another man came on the screen brandishing broken plastic buckets. Chomelea, slang for soldering, was his trade. On a good day, the man said, he went home with Sh100. What was that to his family, where five children waited for food and demanded an education? The only viable alternative, he said, was to steal. "But if I steal, I’ll get shot," he reasoned out aloud. "So what’s the use?"

KTN had a similar story from the slums, where life runs in half-measures. A struggling shopkeeper displayed all sizes of measuring cans. The shopkeeper explained how no one in his neighborhood could afford to buy an entire 2kg of Jogoo, the country’s favourite maize flour. Not even a whole kilo of sugar, or 500g cooking oil. So, he beaks everything into tiny bits, suited for "small pockets".

There could not be better stories on budget week. Yet, if you’re reading this and you don’t speak Kiswahili, this is all news. Those chaps all told their stories in Kiswahili, at Prime time news, read in English. And nobody bothered to tell you what the heck was going on.

It is outright arrogant to expect that non Kenyans who want to follow the news should learn English. Failing to run subtitles on non-English conversation is also gross negligence for a country that relies heavily on foreign hands to turn the wheels of the economy. The country is teeming with non-immigrant investors. In deed, the media has repeatedly told us that the country’s wealth is largely controlled by foreigners. Yet the same media doesn’t seem to get it that development partners need to understand life on the ground.

When politicians get out of town to deliver those famous funeral speeches, they are best at home in their local dialects. Many of them, from the country’s Deputy Speaker and Cabinet ministers to notorious loudmouth backbenchers, rumble in local dialects as reels of tape roll to capture it all. And nobody bothers to translate the clip into English at Prime time news.

Not even presidential speeches. Ok, you probably won’t find when President Moi ever spoke in his native Tugen on national television. But Kibaki has been on record speaking Kikuyu with the country watching. So did the country’s founding father, Jomo Kenyatta. Nonetheless, all our presidents have shown considerable comfort speaking Kiswahili, whenever they were not reading from official script. Even at national holiday addresses, the most juicy and quotable stuff came from their off-the-cuff remarks. And many diplomats sat through it all, in a daze, even later at TV time. Life here simply doesn’t run in English. When most Kenyans meet, they usually begin conversation in Kiswahili. When they establish that they are from a common tribe, often the conversation shifts into dialect. Never mind after 10pm, when everyone in a pub or a matatu deliberately drops Kiswahili and all dialects -- suddenly perceived as languages for lesser mortals. Strange, but only alcohol seems to elicit a sudden imperative to speak English. Probably because the mind senses a need to command a sense of self-importance. And, for some reason, the average Kenyan brain imagines self-importance is communicated only in English.

Not so in real life, when our guard is down. From the middle class down, life in this country is lived in the nearest local language. So, when news people come around to document life – forget press conferences and stiff, official functions – they rarely run into English. The bulk of urban newsworthy events happen in Kiswahili.

And when it airs on television and radio at English prime time, non-Kiswahili speakers are left by the wayside, totally cut out.