Kenyan student lands prestigious post at top notch UK university

By KIUNDU WAWERU

Kenya: The University of Manchester prides itself as one of the first and most eminent of English universities. It boasts of a number of Nobel Prizes and is renowned for groundbreaking research.

For this reason, one Kenyan student is elated to be the first Kenyan recently elected in a competitive student’s Exec Team, a powerful body of only eight members making decisions on behalf of more than 40,000 student union members.

Tessy Maritim, 20, a final year Law student joins the Exec Team, the biggest student union in the UK, as the Diversity Officer. The mandate of her office is to deal with international and postgraduate students affairs.

Wherever, whenever

The team’s eight members include the Diversity Officer, a General Secretary, Community and Education Officers, among others.

Miss Maritim beat other five strong candidates to bag the post by getting about 19,000 votes. “At a time when so many Kenyans abroad are flourishing, I think it’s really important to share my win with those at home to encourage them that they can be victorious and conquer wherever in the world they are! I am proudly Kenyan and feel honoured to represent my country at this level,” she says.

Maritim, a former student of Braeside School in Lavington, Nairobi says going for the post was a self-challenge.

“I knew that either way, I would win — if I lost the elections, I would have gained invaluable experience from the campaign. If I won, of course, I would have the position.”

Campaign manifesto

However, she embarked on a strategy, including coming up with a six-point campaign manifesto.

Her friends came in handy. They rallied for her through their networks. She visited lecture halls for ‘shout-outs’, and even gave out sweets. She used promotional banners and chalk messages on bus stops and walls with the #SHEWINSWEWIN #1 VOTE DIVERSITY OFFICER, messages.

The manifesto that endeared her to the diverse student community included her intention, when elected to advocate for scholarships for international students and also promote diversified work opportunities in places like Australia, Africa and South America.

Tessy also seeks to lobby the university to allow international students to re-sit exams in their respective home countries. “Currently, the university does not allow this. As international students, we have to travel to Manchester during school holidays to do the re-sits.”

Unite students

Since the elections, Maritim has started work with gusto. She hopes to bring the people of the world at the university as one through sports and culture, even as she implements the rest of her campaign promises.

But she knows the one-year tenure will not be easy. “I know it will be challenging to implement policies because there are different interests to be considered. But I believe that at the end of my tenure, I will have accomplished all my policies.”

But she is not afraid because she is daily guided by words that have inspired great men around the world including Nelson Mandela and Richard Nixon. These are words by American President Theodore Roosevelt, “The Man in the Arena”, from his 1910 speech, Citizenship in a Republic: “The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming...”

She says she wants to encourage her fellow youth to chase their passions. “If you want to succeed, you must face your fears today,” she says.

Indeed, as Roosevelt continued in “The Man in the Arena” who knows...“at the best in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”