private lives in public spaces

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Private Lives in Public Spaces

[email protected] Jan-2011 1

Before, it used to be your people versus my people but now this gaming console just went a notch

higher, it is now my child versus those children in public schools. The parents of the children in private

schools are concerned about their children being denied what is rightfully theirs – a place in a public

school. Instead, their place has been auctioned off to the cheapest bidder from the lower cadres of

society. This in their view is totally unthinkable; it is they who have spent a fortune on the “education”

of their well bred children! We are after all, a “free” country in which people are rewarded by the sweat

of their brow and not by playing favorite to the outlandish “underclass”. Their sons and daughters and

daughters’ sons attend those cramming schools (read: private schools) to learn the virtue of hard work

and attain to the most glorious professions in the country via admission to those public secondary

schools where they are “taught” by recital method. Even if they do not make it through the education

conveyer belt, well, the rich can always entertain themselves in the thrill of affording the luxury of taking

a horse that could never win to the races and still have it declared winner!

The guardians of the financially underprivileged are more than thrilled at the seemingly sudden change

of fortune – Oh, how the mighty have fallen! There is, according to them, renewed hope that their sons

and daughters will rise to the highest picks of learning and stand shoulder above the haughty andhitherto mighty who always looked down upon them. Moreover, the kind of education on offer does not

suite the progeny of the well to do aristocracy. It is simply too tedious and irrelevant and the only

people who can really thrive in such hackneyed conditions are the people staring at the door of poverty

in their face! So, for a rich man’s kid to go to the best public institutions only to end up in his father’s

couch is clearly an unparalleled waste of public resources.

It can be said that the well to do have no need for education but they for the most part attribute their

wealth to education and by and by would rather their offspring tasted of the fruit of “knowledge” that

they too may sustain the streak of good fortune and pile up even more riches. As for the poor, they

reason that if it is education that makes people rich their kids must have as much of it as they can with aview to uplifting their families out of that which is regularly described as the vicious cycle of poverty. In

other words, the man of prosperity wants his daughter to be an architect, to add to the deco of his

perceived achievements while the poor man desperately hopes that his son prospers in the legal career

to, once and for all, strike a mortal blow to their hitherto unkempt family standing. These are two sides

of the same coin.

None of the two kids, be they from rich or poor family backgrounds, exhibits a major awareness of the

public sphere. From when they were tender shoots all the way to young adulthood, their lives were

entirely domesticated and by extension they are not conscious of the very public space they live in. Their

motives are driven entirely by family circumstances and peer recognition. They only endeavor to extract

a private gain in a public sphere through the pursuit of education and professional life. Understandably,

the architect will join the local offices of some suave international architectural firm and earn a

handsome salary for lending her local face to an otherwise foreign enterprise. Someone else but not her

should deal with the mess of public life, be it in the slums next to their family manor or in some far flung

village where her grandmother lives.





If she cannot surmount the hurdles of local education, she will be flown out to some sassy college

abroad to attempt her hand in political science; when she jets back her daddy can always ask his

corporate buddies to create for her the post of, shall we say, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)

Director. She is brazen enough to choose an irrelevant course to study because it is “fun” and as such

she does not feel obliged to learn something that can make a difference in her home town; besides she

really does not require foreign qualifications to meaningfully impact the life of that shack dweller who

mans her gate from 6pm to 6am. Indeed, it is almost laughable how in her stay abroad she willingly

washed other people’s dishes but back home she requires the services of a house help. Well, her hands

are full, juggling between box office “thrillers” and night outings…so many choices to be had so little a

time!

In view of her newly acquired tastes, it is apparent that all she succeeds in doing is taking hard earned

dollars gained off the backs of coffee and tea farmers and gifting them to the Americans who already

have them in excess – their mints never stop running. The knowledge she has amassed cannot equate to

a kilogram of coffee in the context of its practical relevance to the farmer! Neither is she willing to work

in a plantation, like the “uneducated” do, to recover the amount of foreign currency consumed by herforeign escapades in the name of “higher” education. Ironically, had she spent a fraction of her precious

time in the farm, she would have learnt much more.

The consequence of this is that, for her lifestyle of fast cars and “high-end” electronic gadgets to be

maintained, the country’s Treasury will have to borrow dollars from abroad by mortgaging the Kenyan

farmlands to foreigners for what has become known as “foreign aid” and “development”; so that

foreigners can grow flowers, which take up land and water resources but have no purpose to the

inhabitants other than aesthetic appeal. Gradually, the farmlands get smaller and the natives become

squatters in their own country. There is no need for alarm, though, theirs is a sovereign state!

This newly found lifestyle of the “educated” is a cover for their lack of technical ability nevertheless due

to this very lack their role as a human resource is meaningless. In the course of their schooling, they

amassed a gigantic glossary of vocabulary but did not develop the mental capacity to digest the

boundless phraseologies for real life application. Such dysfunctional forms of learning are merely

beneficial to the paper and book binding industries.

In this delusion called education, development is thus taken to be those things which give to society the

appearance of modernity. To solve endemic problems associated with a “backward” society, society has

to look to “advanced” devices from foreign “experts” for want of home grown solutions; and how easy

foreigners have had it in selling this “development” to the unsuspecting masses. Not many seem to

consider that development will not occur without technical ability and a superficial education only swells

the consuming herds of “modernity” but it does not make up for the deficiency in mastery of technical

skills. Sadly, an education that can only churn out artisans creates a technical gap. This then leads to

constant dependency on the technical abilities of other countries which have no scruples in extracting

more than a pound of flesh from the infant nations.





The aspiring lawyer from Wajir, on the other hand, with all the hopes of the community set on him will

be a lawyer alright having graduated “summa cum laude” from Law School. Most regrettable, however,

is the fact that his home town with its recurrent drought phenomenon is not in need of a lawyer to

litigate between man and natural forces. His law degree does not make him any better placed to dig a

dam or even a borehole! In a nutshell, his choice of “education” renders him a wasted asset to the very

community that sacrificed and chaperoned him to pursue higher education in the city in the hope that

his education would make a difference in their lives. In his choice of career, he did not stop to reflect,

that perhaps a more technical course would yield more permanent solutions to the intermittent

droughts which plague his birth place.

His siege mentality enables him to find the shortest route by which he can gain access to “riches” and

cast poverty and drought to the backwater! If legal practice does not flourish, how about an NGO to

bring “development to the marginalized” through “development partners”…he will have to “make it” by

any other means. He simply has to “catch up” with the latest in monogrammed suites and Italian cuisine.

Italy, a land as distant as the stars to Wajir, is now his second home in dress and palette at least. One

even wonders how this man from Wajir would survive without an electric fern in this rather hot Nairobiweather. He has not forgotten his people though, as one day he intends to and will eventually represent

them in that sacrosanct institution called the National Assembly; during question time he will ask what

the Government is doing to alleviate the drought situation in North Eastern for which at the end of the

month he will collect a fat cheque for services rendered to the people of Wajir!

With a few exceptions, the educated men and women, no matter their background, have been on a

mission to gain access to public resources for their own private gain without due consideration for the

negative externalities that accompany such actions. It appears that that is all the “education” there is –

no wonder people spend a fortune on it.

As for the emerging wrangles between private and public school sponsors, their pupils are only the

latest privateers in the public space wanting to make do and to get ahead with our sentimental kind of

education. They, like their predecessors to whom public space has availed much, will advance in this

circus called schooling where they will perfect the art of pretending to be useful to society with their

mindless education. Thereafter, these mutated seed shall be sown into the world and proceed to

mortgage what remains of the public sphere for fast cars and big houses, all in the name of hollow

niceties like “freedom”, “development” and above all “public interest”.

private lives in public spaces

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