Kenyan marathon virtuoso Eliud Kipchoge says he usually wakes up early with the birds to do his thing: Training to become the best of the best in athletics. He keeps being the best, including when he did the 1.59 show in 2019, saying “no human is limited”.
Just like the top athletes have realised there is a big value in training regularly and starting early, people report or are made to report to school early. In our recent story, ‘Early birds weave, they don’t cheat in exams,’ we enumerated how the early rising students share paths, including narrow and busy roads, with top executives and other icons who are wont to report to work ahead of the rest.
When you leave your home this early as a student, from when you were in pre-school, your handlers and self were preparing you to become a hero or shujaa in Kiswahili. In Kenya, there is a national celebration every October 20 to honour various heroes and heroines in various fields. Sports people rule this list.
Unfortunately, Kenya is honouring heroes while the country’s rankings in key areas like corruption perception, forest cover, ease of doing business, and human rights remain at the ebb of the global charts. Why are Kenyans, who went to some of the best schools in the world, not turning around the economy, and not showing the rest that they were prepared to roar, grow, and keep rowing into the deep of excellence and dignity?
The moment you choose to go to school, you set sail and are convinced you want to row your boat into the deep waters, struggling with the fiercest waves to return to the shores with a juicy catch for self, your country and the entire world.
The world is mapped in people who followed their paths so diligently and are doing great exploits, saving the world from challenges and complex problems such as climate change, crime, food insecurity, pollution, deceit, and failing love.
We ask: Why should you rise early, take years in school and keep reading the very good books by celebrated authors to end up compromising your professional ideals? Why should you leave your warm bed and home so early to go meet with business executives to plot a fraud?
Like others have wondered: When shall Kenya have a new list of well-known heroes and heroines who can sort out the modern challenges like corruption if the first liberation mashujaa faced off with colonialists, physically fighting with them using crude weapons?
When you choose to go to school, you are creating a barrier between you and short-cuts, shoddiness, half-heartedness and are taking the longest routes possible to do things the right way to the amazement of the world’s best auditors and reviewers.
It is, therefore, a big shame that Kenya’s Auditor General, for example, has been releasing qualified reports, warning that billions of shillings are at risk in the hands of supposed professionals who braved the early morning chills to walk to school, read, revise and pay top dollar to become, among others, accountants, teachers, journalists, farmers, doctors, and quantity surveyors.
So far, Kenyan professionals, probabbly because of certificates and not deed, have scored below par and it is time they were questioned on their resolve to go to school.
We cannot have a country where buildings under construction collapse like a house of cards while people from the built environment dot key companies and agencies. Why should people take years at university and bribe their ways into jobs because HR professionals take shortcuts to employ cronies, relatives and friends?
