It was with much disgust that we heard retired President Moi warn against overhauling the 8-4-4 system. He still would like Kenyans to operate like robots, cheat to win exams, get admitted to campus and retain that conveyor belt of deceit. We hereby request Moi to enjoy his retirement in peace, and to keep opinions to himself.
This powerful preaching by an unknown pastor calls for individuals to go the extra mile. To read more, write more, discover more, instead of being hopeless worshippers of consumerism.
If we are the generation that will bring about change in this country, then we have to invest in our brains and specialising in our skills to deliver perfection. That lack of perfection is especially manifested in Nairobi’s corporate world, where adverts leave a lot to be desired. The best that an ad-agency supposedly with the best brains can do, is to parade sexually-provocatively dressed women and use sex-appeal to create shock value.
Bars in restaurants use skimpily clad girls to hawk shots of whisky and tequila, so why would multinationals and ad-agencies resort to such pedestrian marketing techniques? Simply put, when you base your recruitment on looks, and papers that can be easily acquired, you eliminate the genuine talent which has to be head-hunted.
Chase Bank is one such example that exploited sexism by suspect hiring based not on skills and ability, but purely for looks and potential to rope in clientele using sex-appeal. Masters students should consider this topic for their thesis, as the Chase Bank collapse has even been subject of international news.
This audio simply encourages you to be the best that you can be, by making small alterations in your life. It forbids the culture of being glued to TV or watching DVD, largely a common past-time for many young Kenyans, and encourages people to read beyond mainstream media.
Believe it or not, we are products of a failed 8-4-4 system that made us slaves to books and not the mind. We have been educated by teachers of little exposure and inferior training, whose low self-esteem saw them not motivating us by putting us down. They told us what we couldn’t be consistently and later act shocked when they see students they’d previously ruled out, prosper in life.
So any curriculum review has to extend to teacher-training colleges and all teachers need to be put through refresher courses so as to stay updated with the latest trends. All what we studied has become obsolete. For instance, NASA has since revealed that the solar-system has more than 9 planets. Has this information been updated in the mediocre 8-4-4 syllabus?
Our teachers looked at matters from the prism of inability. They were never updated and now that there’s social-media, it’s incumbent upon us to ensure that the next generations don’t undergo the same mediocrity like we did.
For instance, the exponential growth of the gospel music industry is solely because gospel artistes are allowed to visit schools during events, and perform to students. Secular/alternative music is banned by teachers from the state-run teacher training colleges, and even the children who embark on music careers in highschools are only limited to gospel. It’s the reason you saw Ezekiel Mutua of the Kenya Film Classification Board (KFCB) banning a Coca-Cola advert because of “kissing” which we do all the time with our wives and girlfriends, whilst invoking African traditions and christianity. Yet the same people attended Bob Collymore’s wedding to someone’s former wife, a scenario that was totally un-African. This is simply a means to control the masses using vain and retarded arguments, a culture that we need to call out, by admonishing the journalists who cover Mutua’s pressers, because of the brown-envelopes.
It’s the reason why gospel music sensations Bahati, Willy Paul, etc quickly revert to secular music after both they and their fans outgrow the gospel music phase that’s reinforced by the mediocre 8-4-4 system. We need to open up highschools to change, and especially rigid teachers and mediocre principals, who read from the pathetic scripts instilled in them since their days studying in third-rate teacher training colleges like Kagumo, Kilimambogo, Kitui, Kisii, etc. None of today’s teachers attends refresher courses.
It’s the reason that students from international schools (those who are not alcoholics) prosper in whatever they do, because “impossible” is a voculburary they’ve never heard in their lives. It’s the reason St. Mary’s thieves have permeated the economy, looting it left, right and center, because they think they can get away with it.
Why should Moi lecture Kenyans on the benefits of 8-4-4 yet his own children studied in international schools? Does he have the moral-authority to even harbour an opinion after he messed up entire lives of Kenyans?
Again Kenyans, why do we tolerate so much bullshit from the ruling class?