By Barrack Muluka

Our educational institutions are easily the poison chalice in our national lap. They are the enemy of nationhood. You know about the little village of Emanyulia, where they eat chicken for breakfast, lunch, dinner and even with evening tea.

There are two chickens boiling in every cooking pot and the people are satisfied and God is happy and smiling in heaven.

But the village is also symptomatic of what has gone wrong with our experiments with education, on the one hand, and nationhood on the other. That is the conclusion you draw when you engage with my village mate, Amakulie W’Opaka.

We had a big debate with him the other day; for he is one of those people who say that whenever I am privileged to speak on radio in my mother-tongue, I do not speak like a true Luhya.

Nothing wrong with my diction, idiom, phonology, supra-segmental features and assorted linguistic stuff. He just finds me to be "too cool and deficient of the warrior" blood that he would like to see in a true Luhya man who has the interests of the tribe at heart. I am not a Luhya patriot, he says. I do not ventilate towards Kenyans of other tongues the kind of hostility that he expects of "people who are privileged to speak on radio."

Fundamentally, W’Opaka is disturbed that I do not even seem to share in the notion that the Abaluhya people are the second most populous community in Kenya and worse still that they should "rule other Kenyans." Of course, that is the kind of blather I do not believe in. I have never shared in the dominant Luhya notion, for example, that Deputy Prime Minister, Musalia Mudavadi, should become the next man in State House, just because he is Luhya. I don’t think for a moment that people should become presidents just because they are Kikuyu, Luhya or Luo. That is dim-witted tribal garbage. I will not peddle such useless tribal merchandise. And I have no respect for those who sell such stuff, regardless that the merchandise is Luhya, Kikuyu, Luo, or whatever.

It shocks me, therefore, to see Vice President Kalonzo Musyoka listen and nod keenly as ethnic supremacists praise him to the high heavens, as they talk of how they will support him to be the next man on the hill.

You cannot be an ethnic supremacist and at the self-same time want to be the President of Kenya. The two just do not go together. That is why I cannot support the empty mantra of "Musalia for President." The man will first have to bring other assets to the national rostrum before I can support him. I refuse to support or oppose people just because of their ethnicity.

But Amakulie W’Opaka cannot understand this. Blame it on his education. The trouble is that this country preponderates with Amakulies W’Opaka. W’Opaka was born in Emanyulia Village. He attended Emanyulia Primary School and went on to Namasoli Secondary School.

A bright boy, he went on to read for a Bachelor of Education degree in the then Maseno Campus of Moi University. Upon graduation, he was employed as a teacher in a local high school. Now all these institutions are all within an overall span of eight kilometres. Such is the restricted world in which W’Opaka has lived and learnt poisonous things for 30 years. Now he is teaching the same poisonous things to young people. His is a xenophobic world that holds everybody who does not belong to the tribal breed as an enemy.

Kenya lost it at some point, with these "villagized" pseudo-scholars who think that their villages are the world.

Tragically, it seems to be an accepted practice that scholarship in Kenya must now be villagized. You now have universities and university campuses all over the place, serving specific tribes.

The student population is preponderantly from the tribe and most have never stepped outside the province at the time of graduating. Your guess is as good as mine on the kind of students W’Opaka is producing. And there are enough W’Opaka’s teaching on our tribal university campuses from Mount Kenya to Lake Victoria.

They are there at Pwani University and at Masinde Muliro University and in pseudo-university campuses shamelessly spangled in noisy shopping centres and dusty market places across the country. These caricature academies are manufacturing xenophobic characters, inebriated on ethnic power alcohol.

They are the fellows who insist that the vice-chancellor, the teaching staff and God knows who else, must all be from the tribe. They insist that the President must come from their tribe and that it is their time to eat.

If you are wondering why there is so much ethnic thundering across Kenya, look in our education institutions for answers.

—The writer (okwaromuluka@yahoo.com) is a publishing editor and media consultant.