Baptism by fire for graduands as they face joblessness

By the time you’re reading this, at least three universities will have held their graduation ceremonies in the past week. What that means is that, as at this exact moment, there are at least 5,000 newly minted employable young adults out there without a single clue of what to do with their lives moving forward.

I have in the past written about how to cope with life post-graduation from the eyes of friends who have been there. Today, however, I want to tell these new graduands how their lives are going to be from now on.

For starters, of course you’re going to spend the first couple of months doing nothing except sleeping and eating your parents' food.

You will wake up at 12pm and have breakfast and lunch immediately thereafter then go back to sleep and wake up at 4pm for evening tea then watch a few films before taking a quiet stroll around the neighbourhood.

You will come back and have dinner then go back to sleep again. By the third month, your mother will have become tired of seeing your idle face all over the house doing nothing except increasing the family budget by eating like six people and wasting the new mattress reserved for her chama visitors.

The excitement about you graduating will start to die down. So she will give you some money and tell you to go visit your grandparents.

She will send you fare back after the fourth month. And you will return to your old life of sleep-eat-stroll-sleep-repeat. Except this time your phone will have stopped ringing and your WhatsApp notifications taken a nosedive.

People you used to drink and share memes with in campus will by then have moved on with their lives and found more interesting people. You will be lonely and bored.

This is where you will start sleeping around. Two months later and, if you’re a boy, you will have 'known' Sarah (church elder’s daughter), Lisa (from Facebook), Charity (also Facebook), Talia (Tinder), Brenda (cleaning lady), even Wambui (the neighbour’s mboch.)

But all this will still not fill the void in your soul. One year down the line and your mother will start pushing you to look for a job or a volunteer gig. Anything to get you out of the house and to stop you from filling her house with 'weed' smoke.

So you will start dropping CVs and the receptionists in the companies you apply to will always tell you they will call you back. But, for some strange non-scientific reason, they never will.

At least not for the next three to five years. Which will come as a surprise because you could have sworn you read somewhere that the government has created at least 30,000 new jobs.