Supping With the Devil

Success at any cost seems to be the plastic guiding light in our lives as Kenyans albeit latently. Don't get me wrong for painting the virtues of success in bad light. But what I mean here is success that is exclusively rolled into the depth of your pockets.

We have unwittingly placed price tags on virtually everything upto and including our morals as a nation. The hitherto revered title Mzee which conveyed honour and respect is nowadays bandied with abandon to anybody who can doll out handouts to sycophants. what is more, these so-called tycoons end up misconstruing their priced fame into popularity contests with eyes shamelessly trained on political price. Do I need to belabour the awful quality of leaders we have? Well, you guess is as good as mine.

Money has turned into a god that controls every facet of our lives and its scent makes us go gaga with no element of sophistication. My heart bleeds for the young generation of Kenyans who will refuse to take up their university places because they have been admitted to study BA arguing that such courses have no future (read money) for them. We couldn't be more naive and short-sighted.

To equate education to wealth is to cuddle inverted priorities. It is comparison based on the wrong premises to say the least and flawed at worst. One leads to the other and the converse is not true. Ask Njenga Karume what his wish is to have and money would not be one of them. He could be able to pay all Kenya civil servants for a whole year frok his pocket but he can't buy the cognitive powers that are only imparted in formal classroom.

True, you don't need a degree to qualify as an intelligent and wise Kenyan by village standards. But come to think of it folks, the psychomotor and affective skills have their own limitations in the absence of their cognitive cousin. Make no mistake, I am not demonising wealth per se. But the truth remains that the rich fools have succeeded in trashing the quality of what lies in between our ears by brainwashing to only value what they have, mourn what we lack and devalue and despise what we possess. Tell me dear Kenyans, who is the smarter one now?

We are busy hawking our treasured certificates in the market for the highest bidder to sample and shit on. We even shamelessly call some village semi-illiterate professor of politics just because they can shrewdly play us against each other using ill-gotten wealth for their selfish survival. If only we could take a minute to reminice and reflect on what it takes to earn a degree leave alone obtaing a PhD before you scale the academic ladder to be a professor! It amounts to a disgraceful insult to our collective intelligence as Kenyans in general and to the diligent dons in particular. No wonder the latter are left envying the space occupied by sardines in a tin as they squeeze themselves in metal contraptions going by the name of matatus.

We must return to and appreciate the basics of life and more importantly respect the value of education for what it is. Education must not be left at the mercy of political sharks and turncoats. It must be left to professions because it remain the singular known foundation of any success and development. Until that is done, we are inadvertently ruining our lives and motherland in advance and that is no worse a sin than supping with the devil.

Taabu