Someone Lied To You, Mwananchi

by Njoki (re-posted with her kind [and baffled] permission)

There’s probably no phrase I hate hearing like I do “the youth”. Sentences starting with “The youth of these days are…” !!! There’s the implication, by the usually patronizing tone making such statements, that youth is inexperienced and ignorant and foolish and shallow and reckless.

Youth, I feel (and I may be biased as one of the so-called “youth”) is for dreams and hopes and colour and fights and decisions and experience and living.
Anyhow, before I digress further into a non-point, there’s a way everyone who’s even set foot in a university is supposed to feel deeply privileged. Not everyone gets that chance, we’re told, to keep studying after secondary school. So we should consider ourselves lucky – blessed, even – and work as hard as we can.

Then we go to public universities and find that people have to carry chairs into lecture halls because there’s not enough space, and the administration conveniently forgot to expand facilities for the multitudes whose fees they’re accepting. Toilets are cleaned once a week (if at all) – and that’s if there’s water. There’s no tissue paper or soap available, even as we should be leading the country as examples of good hygiene, and it’s somehow acceptable to have effing flies all over effing sanitary towel disposal units. Sub-standard condoms run out in rusty government dispensers and are replaced months later…as we “fight” HIV.

Most lecturers last gave a damn centuries before we were even born, don’t usually bother to mark assignments, and if they do, they use arbitrary marking schemes that differ from person to person, they ridicule any questions asked in their sessions, their presentations are the very same ones they’ve been making since the university got its charter and all that if they bother to turn up for class at all. Libraries are full to bursting of books so outdated that even fires would be ashamed to be lit using the paper from them. Administrative processes are vague and unhelpful; you arrive in a room and (after your story has been forced out of you by 5 people who are just looking to pass time and don’t care either way) are told that the one person who can sign your document went on leave and their phone is off and no one knows how to reach them.

School. If you’re being taught anything, it’s that one can get paid for mediocrity and shoddiness.

Some of the brave just up and leave university and chart a different path. Those that decide to stay and fight may finish, but leave very jaded by a system that has taken more from them than it has given, carrying the remains of their dreams in coffins of harsh reality. People had grand dreams. To be lawyers that argue out points and take part in constitution-making for justice and equality. Then you find out you have to wear clothes like morgue attendants to go to court, wear smelly horsehair wigs (EFFING WHY??!!), spend hours going through lengthy documents deceptively labelled “briefs”, then have someone guilty go scot-free because he knew who to pay.

You wanted to be a doctor. Save lives, serve humanity, and all that jazz. You find that supplies have to be locked away – because, apparently, if they’re not, the employees or patients will steal them – and that it takes over an hour to get one blood sample because the guy who was last seen with the key to the supply closet has mysteriously disappeared to a place in the hospital which seems to have no network. You then have to prescribe essential drugs which the patient’s family has to go and buy from chemists in town because the hospital has run out, and the tender process has gotten stuck between committee approvals. You wanted to be an engineer. Your school books are so ludicrously out of date, people use them as doorstops and foot-rests. People are teaching you math that you’ll NEVER use in everyday life.

And that’s the kind of life form 4’s countrywide are urged to aspire to. ??!!

That’s an education system that is doing nothing to remain relevant to a people who are exposed to world-class standards and have to compete in an international job market. Then there’s the right-wing parents and guardians and teachers, pouring vitriol on those who have unorthodox dreams, usually of the artistic and sporting variety. Going home to say that you want to be like Didier Drogba or Eric Wainaina! Be serious, they say. Be a lawyer. A doctor. Go do computers. French.

Kids aren’t told to think about what will make them happy or asked if 5 years from now they’ll still be OK doing the same thing every day. Kids aren’t encouraged to find what they’re good at or told that life is about getting better at that. Kids are told to do what will bring home the money. Something that will guarantee them a job. Money in the bank. However it gets there is not the issue. And the hustle is all about getting there first, undercutting everyone else if you want to win.

So, of course people will cheat in exams, if only to leave overcrowded schools and their demon lecturers. Of course they’ll start the hustle by taking bulbs from lecture theatres and selling them. Of course there will be disregard for public property, and gum will be stuck under broken desks and upholstery on chairs torn seconds after refurbishing. Of course there’ll be regional organizations like Loitokitok Students Union where the first item of the agenda of the meeting is “Constituency Development Fund”, and how the students of the union can get their hands on some of it.

Of course student politics will be a dirty game. People are practicing for the real thing. At the end of the day, though, there’s no excuse for lawlessness, but if it’s the only thing you can see giving results that seem to work?

We’re teaching the youth, who are the dawning of future hope, tomorrow’s leaders – and all the other clichés attached to the young – that if they love music and art and sports or whatever, they have to bury that joy for this; to sit in ancient, stuffy auditoriums and dust off moldy books. That to succeed, they must go to university and do “marketable” degrees with course outlines which haven’t ever changed since the teachers got their degrees, with minimal help from the system. The same system that will then preach to them to stay home and build the nation despite salaries that cannot keep up with inflation rates…and so they will have to have a dodgy undercover hustle to make things work.

So to you, college dropouts…godspeed. To you, college when-will-this-all-enders…godspeed, as well.

“It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it, but the young know they are wretched, for they are full of the truthless ideals which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real, they are bruised and broken.”
W. Somerset Maugham, “Of Human Bondage”.

Njoki