While almost everyone in Kenya talks about poor service delivery, the number willing to serve is increasingly becoming thinner.
While age and system of education among other low-hanging excuses have been cited, the rot hurting service delivery is now worse than cancer.
It is increasingly becoming difficult to distinguish between work by an expert and that of a clueless hand masquerading while putting his own life and that of others at a risk.
Disappointing experiences have formed an ugly mound that sadly continues to attract all and sundry. It will soon overflow and engulf this and next generations, stifling chances of national growth and pride.
While Kenyans are walking fast under the guise of work, a few discerning educators and employers are anxious about the attitude towards work ethic and attitude.
Across the ages, workers, seasoned and people on induction want to do little, claiming they are working smart. That they didn’t go to school for blue-collar roles. That they are thinkers. But they lack the capcity to turn the same thoughts into concrete products of growth and honour.
The dignity of labour is always considered of prime importance for a nation that wants to generate enough wealth to feed her population, store the surplus, and develop.
Employers are clutching on straws talking about building complicated KPI charts without understanding what lies between input and output.
There may be other factors that either impede or facilitate the progress of a people but none is as crucial to the future as cultivating a sense of service among the citizens.
When service is enhanced, economic productivity improves.
Labour is not a ceremonial experience in the life of a nation. It is a core aspect and contributes much towards development and is an indicator of meaningful education. Or else school remains largely a symbolic institution that dramatises the lazy composition of a nation’s workforce.
Does the Kenyan school environment nurture the goals of hard work?
A good school should create an atmosphere where the seeds of right attitude and behaviour are selected, planted, weeded, and irrigated among the learners so they can match the high exacting standards desired by the nation at every moment.
For a long time, majority of the workers have wrongly believed that they serve a foreign power as was the case during colonial period. The Kenyan worker who felt mistreated by the white imperial powers, ended up hating the employer. He thus exploited every opportunity on a narrow range of benefits.
A good fraction of Kenyan employees have borrowed from the predecessors the slogan, “A man eateth where he worketh.” Thus, away from the boss, this type of worker looks for opportunity to pilfer or waste time while watching the clock to sign off the day’s roster and return home.
The Ministry of Education must urgently review its various policies to develop in learners, right from primary school, the willingness to work physically while discharging duties across sectors.
Physical work here means taking time to do what ought to be done within the stipulated time. If it’s clearing a field for planting, do that. If you must read, burn the midnight oil to help you with useful idea generation and meaningful. None must be ready to approve positions they don’t understand.
Perhaps, the notion of white collar jobs has worked against many of the graduates. Unraveling this may take time but it ought to start.
The pride of a teacher should not be in how many ‘As’ she has produced, but rather building the exemplary ability in students. Producing the paper ‘As’ is a form of success, yes, but what matters today and tomorrow is the culture of A-plain performance.
Teachers should encourage learners to believe and target that all good work, no matter how humble, contributes significantly to wellbeing of everyone.
It is disturbing that an Agriculture graduate (Bachelor’s or advanced degree) would rather starve looking for a job instead of turning his ancestral land into a haven of food production. Without imagination, they are living in city squalor while they have many acres of fertile land in less populated villages with fresh air lying idle.
To them, a job is a Ministry of Agriculture or international NGO appointment while these same organisations are offering billions of shillings in funding for innovative food production ideas.
This lack of respect for manual labour among the youth is working against graduates, many of them claiming and dangling First Class degrees. Degrees that can’t assess situations, design, test and apply solutions.
Administrators and managers, teachers, and the support staff in a great majority of learning institutions ought to be examples of the desired service. Of course, there are a few exceptional servants that students remember.
The school should be a functional, influential model of modern service delivery by and for the learners. Do the administrators listen? Do the school authorities respect themselves and the learners? Are they examples of patriotism?
Outside the regular classroom, manual work among learners with no monetary pay, except recognition within the school, does not amount to child labour.
Cleaning and serving in the school compound and occasionally extending it to the immediate community as long as it is not abused help is one of the ways of building the culture of productive work at individual level.
Washing personal effects such as clothes and utensils should not require any amount of supervision because he who cannot serve self cannot serve others.
The school should be a place where work is respected right from finishing classroom assignments and homework on time. Authorities should help the learners to appreciate meeting deadlines and build a sense of completeness because these are what make the educated stand out.
Everyone should understand that work is what it is: self-help.
Labour should not be regarded as something done at one’s convenience. Work, whether manual or that which requires software, should be wired into the fabric of life.
When every citizen applies and values labour, the society flowers and thrives.
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