Mediocrity and shortcuts are gradually killing our country

The Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE) exams kicked off this week with the rather predictable reports of con men hawking what they purported to be genuine exam papers. And even as we condemn the profiteers for their shady sense of enterprise, we need to lay the blame where it lies.

Ladies and gentlemen, let us all stand up and welcome Kenya, a country slowly getting inured to the culture of mediocrity and short-cuts.

Fine, I agree that parents and candidates who buy these papers – real or fake – need to be punished. However, we need to take the blame further and realise it is no longer an idle or academic argument that the culture of cheating in exams may be a microcosmic representation of the society we live in. That our children and their actions can only be a fair summary of what we have taught them, actively and passively.

A bit of background is in order here. Before the Chinese took over the big infrastructure projects in the country, we had added to our informal vocabulary terms such as ‘cowboy contractors’. These were either quacks or professionals who landed huge public contracts but ended up adding a coat of murram on roads they later claimed payment for tarmacking.

In that oh-so-great Kenyan tradition, we also got phony building contractors who swore by anything believable that they could put up sky-hugging skyscrapers. Then in the rush to get the cheque and perhaps take the mistress to Cayman Islands, they built whole towering floors overnight, and did not even let the cement dry up before starting on the next storey. Before long, it came as no surprise that their labour of greed came tumbling down like a kid’s house of maize cobs. It did not end there.

While the Ugandan artistes continued getting rich, we had our own burgeoning River Road piracy underworld that lurked in the dark alleys waiting for writers and musicians to come up with good books and music, which the copyright thugs copied and shamelessly sold to the hawkers for a song.

So our writers and music maestros continue striving for elusive corporate deals and sweating at overnight functions just to keep head above the moral muck. All because they get zilch from selling novels and music CDs. And being a nation that loves drinking – well, there are more bars in Githurai and Eastlands than schools in Nairobi County – this culture of mediocrity hits crescendo in the throat-irrigation sector.

Besides poisonous doses of methanol packaged in plastic bottles, the Nairobi underworld can now falsify the finest Irish and Scotch whiskey. And until a few people are blinded or killed by these portions of poison, which happens every year,  we go on and sing hakuna matata and hold parties on national holiday like one very happy family. Our raucous celebrations are only drowned by our propensity for hatred, now overflowing on social media and whenever our sagacious politicians hit the rally and funeral circuit.

And do I need to say anything more about the occasional raids by the medical practitioners and pharmacists bodies’ that remind us – lest we forget who we are – that in our midst are quacks who prescribe or sell drugs without blinking even when they know full well that they are not qualified to do so? Add to that the many allegations of sexually transmitted marks, jobs, promotions and other favours and you have a society in dire need of a moral revolution. It is one disconcerting trait that seems to be as Kenyan as sukuma wiki!

So before we wax moralistic about the 8-4-4 system and how it produces cheats, we need to look the ugly man in the mirror and acknowledge the familiar face. For before the executives of our massive national projects – who could not buy good shoes yesterday - stop buying guzzlers for their mistresses in the first month of their hiring, we are all knee-deep in the muck of mediocrity and short-cuts. And if we do nothing about it, it will surely strangle this otherwise good nation.