To All Graduates

If you are graduate and every evening and weekend you are drunk, you are the reason Kenya is poor. If you are a graduate looking for an 8 to 5 job you are the reason Kenya is poor. If you are a graduate and you have not done something innovative you do not deserve that degree.

Kenya is not the richest country regionally because of us intellectuals! No, the bitter truth is that while we sit in our comfortable chairs in our offices and banks, and take our kids to private schools and shop in malls and go to the leisure clubs, the hard working high school dropout is opening up a hawking business. The poor, high school graduate is engineering a plane down in Murang’a. As we sip our coffee, the standard 8 graduate who has worked as a mechanic for 2 years is thinking of opening up his own garage or a posho mill. Yes! Kenya is rich because of them, not because of us with our fancy degrees!

If you are an engineer where is the contraption that will help covert our raw produce to finished products? Must we wait for technology from India and Europe? Where is our Kenyan made car, aeroplane, tractors and oil rigs? Why are our roads muddy and dusty? Why are some areas in Kenya still remote? Where are our space flights and satellites?

If you are a medic, where is the cure for AIDS? Are you waiting for western nations to come up with it when it is most beneficial to us? Where is the vaccine for Malaria? Have you become so embroiled in nonsensical short sighted research while forgetting the real problems facing us? Or is your work to strike every day demanding for this or that?

If you have a degree in literature where are your words scorning our lethargy? Inspiring us, making us see the ill of our gluttonous lives? Where are our oral narratives written down? Where is our culture as Africans or are you in cahoots with our enemies who want us to forget who we are?

If you are a veterinarian, like myself, why can’t all Kenyans afford meat? Why are large swathes of prime land unutilised because of trypanasomiasis? Why do we still slaughter each other while trying to steal livestock? And why does 84% of Kenya lie idle when in Saudi Arabia cattle are kept in the desert?

If you have a degree in music, why are we still listening to sexually explicit, ear splitting, and nonsensical imported music? Where is our reggae to the Jamaicans? Where are our traditional musical instruments and songs?

If you are a computer scientist, where is our African made operating systems and softwares for our African made technologies? Why do our industries still use manual equipment or imported technology and associated software?

If you have a degree in mass communication, where are our Kenyan made cartoons? Why do we still prefer and watch foreign soap operas and movies? Where are our intellectual articles and pieces in our newspapers or do you think all we want to see are politician’s shenanigans?

If you are a political scientist why aren’t you promoting ideologies? Where are selfless leaders who are only concerned about the welfare of their people and not about lining their pockets with the poor man’s cash?

As a graduate what are you doing to help those hard working Kenyans who sent you to school? Where is the innovativeness in your field? Where are the Nobel or Pulitzer prizes?

You see they want us to remain lazy. Keep us dependent on their aid. Keep looting our resources until they are depleted. Keep giving us loans until they control everything we do. Keep sending us corruptive songs and movies to replace our values. Keep stealing off, frustrating or killing our innovative minds. Keep sending our scientists in circles on blind ended research.

Yes they are using you. Until you stand up and say no!