Being in school and painstakingly withstanding long hours of learning many subjects from primary to high school in Kenya is an experience to reckon with.You pass through the JAB's axe after Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education and you feel excited.The future flashes before you and you feel the scent of the promised honey and the taste of the flowing milk of the promised land.Canaan looks so close till you never imagine that the red sea lies just meters away and you have not tested how deep its water runs,and whether you need a canoe if not Moses' rod to to split the water and find away to cross over.You get to university and you realize that the many subjects you took,worked hard in and got your passes while in secondary school will not be of importance but just a painful reminder of "have been there and done that"but the thought of the anxiety and disappointment at wasted grades and accompanying wasted time never sets in with a force since the future charmed with success marked by a good job,lots of money to spend,a good car and a good house looks so promising.
The hours spent reading the "jargonized " lingo of the course material at the university or college level makes your mind bloom and burst with a spectacle of this great gentleman or lady making the headlines after school.You become invincible and you imagine the world will be at your mercy.Yet it is the perfect opposite.Many surprises await you on being out of college,waiting like vampires ready to suck hope,enthusiasm,blood and youth out of your system.
An obvious setback that you first face is the "brown envelope syndrome".Since getting a job is not easy not unless you are favoured by the "who you know "society syndrome,you dismount your pride of being one of the learned many to start chasing the hard-to-find jobs around.It is the same society which has kept you intact in a school system for sixteen years but it is the same to demand 3 plus years of experience in order to qualify for paltry salaried job yet no one is ready to offer you even a place to get that very experience in the first place.Your certificates and their copies become a mockery,a reminder of your misery.Every morning you wake up and get to carry it around like some kind of tumor,something a kin to the dehumanizing infamous kipande our grandfathers carried in the 50s when the vile white colonial boss muscled manhood and womanhood out of our nation founder's bodies.You even feel embarrassed to think of yourself as an educated person since you have nothing to show for the papers,more so the fact that the system fed you with with garbage of obsolete and impractical theory and no skills to make you fit in the hands-on-job aspect of the economy.A sympathetic good Samaritan asks you what you can do and you blink a thousand times because you have no idea and because you feel the level you have got,the job might be below your caliber.
But this isn't just yet enough.No one ever teaches you about the exploitative job market.It is a noted factor in the job market in Kenya today that we suffer the problem of excess educated and talented young Kenyans for the limited jobs.So what happens?Because you have no job,no money and exasperatingly searching for something to hang on,you are offered a job but with unsaid grueling terms of condition of work.You work under pressure with the management clawing results out of you by all means.You put in long hours of work and a great deal of commitment for a staggering meager pay.A person seems to be soaring high in the cloud on getting a job but a few months into it and one looks so tired,twice older than before,broken and wielding a faded smile that struggles to hide frustration and the near hopeless level one has got to.At that time,profit margins go high at the pleasure of the bosses who brag of the human capital manipulation skills but your stake in it is wonder,pain and frustrations.After all,is this not what our good banks are doing to our graduates:putting them in the sales section to sell some non-competitive products that fetch little attraction from potential clients yet expected to work miracles and have awesome sales!And at the end of the day for what?This is just one of the ways the society is misusing its expensively got brains,fast sucking them dry and injecting pessimism that works against the nations discourse of progress.
The worst of it all is that no one ever prepares you to fairly participate in this man-eat-man circus neither does any one bother to restore sanity since after,it is our way of living dangerously:no accepting liabilities and living dangerously even if it means over speeding over zebra crossing meant slow vehicles down to allow pedestrians also have their way.
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