By my clock, it's one-and-a-half hours since the deadline for the End Of The World came and went. This world is full of doomsdayers, and I must say, I cannot blame them. This is not the first time that someone has predicted the end of the world, and it will not be the last. It is in the nature of man to predict the worst when things are dire. In Kenya, today, hunger stalks the land amidst plenty. The government is stumbling from one coalition crisis to another. Our borders are about as impermeable as a sieve. Who would not take the doomsday scenario seriously? Apparently a sugarcane farmer in Western Kenya has sold all his worldly possessions, leaving his wife and seven children destitute. He has now been taken into custody by the police. I am still trying to work out what criminal offence he committed, save being incredibly stupid.
In the United States, men and women have made a career of predicting the worst and in an increasingly interconnected world, it is only natural that their crazy musings make their way to otherwise placid places like our fair land. Some time back, another fringe Christian community was persuaded that the end of the world would be accompanied by nuclear hellfire. Suffice to say, in their own peculiar way, they took precautions, gas-masks and all. Of course, they were taking their cue from an American crackpot. The USA is home to more nutcases than a No. 14 'Nissan'. Since we seem to place our faith in American hip hop and rap stars, Oprah and Tyra Banks, why should it surprise us that the fringe elements of the American bible belt have ardent followers this side of the world?
In 1963, when Mzee Jomo Kenyatta was being sworn in as Prime Minister, he identified the triple threats of ignorance, disease and poverty as the issues that an independent Kenya would fight. 48 years later it is clear that we have failed on all three counts. Poverty-levels refuse to fall below fifty per cent. More mothers and children die at child-birth like never before. But it is the continued ignorance of Kenyans that continues to defy all attempts to redress this issue. Mwai Kibaki's Free Primary Education has only served to swell the ranks of primary schools without addressing the key question of quality. Secondary schools keep on churning out students incapable of holding a coherent conversation in either English or Swahili. But it is our ivory towers, the public universities, that take the biscuit.
Very few of our university graduates, and even fewer graduate students, are capable of intellectual engagement at a global level. In 2005, when Kenya was going into a referendum over the so-called Wako Draft, even university professors could be heard declaiming that if Agwambo had read the draft they had not reason to do so, and they would vote 'no' when the referendum came to pass. Similar sentiments are expressed by the K'Ogalo, those rabid supporters of Gor Mahia Football Club: no team is 'allowed' to defeat their beloved team unless Agwambo has been 'consulted'. As a result, they continue to be a blot on the national conscience, raining death and destruction wherever their team suffers defeat on the pitch. It comes as no surprise that the K'Ogalo include doctors, lawyers and teachers among their ranks.
So, when the next doomsday conspiracy inevitably sweeps across the world from that bastion of lunacy that is the United States, do not be surprised if a significant proportion of the lunatic fringe of the Kenyan populace joins in the hysteria. It is only to be expected when we fail year in, year out to sweep out the Augean stables of the rot that permeates our education system.
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