Why do Kenyans confuse letters with numbers?

By MUNGAI KIHANYA

The Sunday Nation

Nairobi,

04 July 2021

Kenyans have peculiar habits: one of them is that they often call letters numbers. Many times, in public gatherings, we hear an announcement like, “Would the owner of car number KCK come and move it?”. It sounds alright until you realise that “KCK” are letters, not numbers! Indeed, the official vehicle registration documents refer to the “mark and number”

This reality was brought to my attention many years ago at Heathrow Airport in London. I went to the information desk to find out where to catch the bus to my final destination. The clerk directed me to go out the main door and look for “stand letter P”. That phrase sounded very awkward for, in Kenyan English, it should have been “stand number P”!

One question that people often ask me is how many cars can be registered in our system of 3 letters and 3 digits. The answer is simple: the 3 digits count 999 and the three letters count 24 x 24 x 24 = 13,824. The total is 999 x 13,824, which comes to about 13.8 million. Of course, I know that there are 26 letters in the alphabet, but the car registration system does not use ‘I’ and ‘O’ – for obvious reasons.

In a related matter, the ministry of education introduced a new student registration system a few years ago – the National Education Management Information System, or NEMIS in short. It was supposed to replace the index numbers. However, for some unknown reason, the NEMIS has not been fully implemented – index numbers are still in use.

I recently managed to get the “NEMIS number” for one of my children and, despite its name, it has just one numeral. In other words, it is not a “number”. I prefer to call it a “code”. It has six characters which appear to be a random mix of letters and numbers.

Naturally, I wondered how many students can be registered in such a code. Each of the six spaces can take either ten numbers (0 to 9) or 24 letters (A to Z, excluding I and O – I do hope they are not using these two letters). That is, there are 34 possible characters in each space, so this code can take 34 x 34 x 34 x 34 x 34 x 34 = 1,544,804,416 (about 1.5 billion) learners. Clearly, even though the NEMIS code is short (six characters), it will serve us for a very long before it is exhausted. Should we use a similar one for vehicles?