Finally, Education Has Monetary Price in Kenya.

If you happen to have read an article named ‘African Intellectual Scum’ penned down by Field Ruwe, a Zambian journalist, what has supervened airing of an expose by one local media house in the last three day has rang a bell about how Africans can use power and resources to ruin people’s lives. The expose, branded ‘Certificates of Doom’ done by Dennis Okari and aired by NTV Kenya is continuing to create ripples in all outlets of the media arena, with people taking sides, either to justify or condemn the expose. Students from the subject institution of Nairobi Aviation College got confused, did not know who to blame and because they could not withhold anger, they stomped the Nation Media Group headquarters, destroying and damaging property and attacking journalists for spotlighting their institution. Whether they were right or wrong to oppugn, the big picture comes into focus. Estimably, 500,000 lives of innocent Nairobi Aviation College graduates from all over the country have been ruined, maybe forever, by a 29-minutes expose. That is a fact, and to add flesh on it, about 80,000 lives of continuing students in the same school have been halted in terms of career and education. But is it really the fault of everybody who has studied in Nairobi Aviation College? Do all of them have fake certificates?No, an independent research shows that not all students from Nairobi Aviation College have fake certificates. In fact, many of them have genuinely and rightfully acquired papers through hard work of not less than a year, have supporting transcripts since sophomore and are able to produce previous qualifications from their Secondary and Primary schools. In an interview done by an online activist blogger after the outrage, a good number of graduates from Nairobi Aviation College said that the sole reason they joined the college was that they couldn’t raise money to join a university. A good number of them had undisputable qualifications for a University. To support this, in every 10 graduates interviewed, at least 3 of them had acquired a B+ in their KCSE, at least 2 had B-, while the rest had C+. The thought provoking article by Field Ruwe tries to shed light on how the scholars and literati in Zambia ride backs of the uneducated to sail heights of success without using the knowledge they acquired in Harvard, Cambridge and MIT to improve lives of Africans. He goes further to illustrate how a White man he sat beside on a plane, formerly an aid worker in Zambia, punched his dignity again and again by cursing and insulting the educated for a hand in the state of living standards in Zambia. It is the same in Kenya, maybe even worse than Zambia. Some of questions that Kenyans are asking themselves are directed towards the government, examining bodies and mid-level to high-notch corruption in our education system. In the social media, questions like: How does Kenya National Examination Council and KASNEB allow students in Nairobi Aviation College to sit for their examinations? Does the government have a clue of the operations of Nairobi Aviation College? Who is greater, the owner of a school or a qualified lecturer? Does City &Guilds have subsidiaries in Kenya to oversee who is being examined? Is that the only college that sells fake certificates and admits illiterate people, which others colleges do the same and how do we know? Does education finally has a price? Well, these are kind of questions worth asking. With a massive eruption of confusing colleges and schools all over the country, a crucial note to keep in mind is that Certificates of Doom are not a new phenomenon in Kenya; cases of original-like fake certificates have always been there in all levels of education, with Kenyan Universities hosting the party.Students have long been known to pay or sleep with lecturers for good grades, examination papers have been known to be left unmarked, packages and gifts have been presented to lecturers and many other things. All this I personally witnessed during my college days. Then comes incompetent imposters who coach students in college. The number of colleges in Kenya may even be exceeding the number of qualified lecturers. On behalf, and as one of the responsible Kenyans who are tired of being the only ones seeming to care around, we no longer know who to trust, who to believe and who to complain to. It is a joint-blame between the relevant institutions, from the government which does not even care about who cons its citizens as long as the economy wheel keeps rolling, to the media which unscrupulously airs anything prematurely and in exchange dooming over a million lives of youth in Kenya,from the intelligentsias who ally with government to come up with con-plants in form of colleges and garner money, to the parents who toil for that cash then blindly hand it to the highest bidder who comes up with a fancy name of a college and a low fee rate. We also don’t know who is qualified and who is not, who is mistaken and who is not. We don’t know which college or university is legitimate and which is not, which examining body exercises their policies and which do not. Whether or not we claim to be educated, I even doubt myself. By: Antony N. R. K. News24: Tony Richu Karomo +254729799666 tonyndungur@gmail.com LinkedIn: Tony Karomo