Nairobi county leadership has failed our children

I left Ofafa Jericho Primary School, Nairobi, in November 1972. That was 44 years ago. I was a high-spirited youth in Class Seven Tiger. School was fun. Learning was great and it blended well with foolish childish mischief. I recall receiving six strokes of the best from my class teacher, Samuel Ng’ang’a Mwaura, for posting on the class bulletin board a cutting from a daily newspaper, titled “Save the tiger.” Mwaura’s angst with the poster was lost on me. I understood that naming classrooms after the wildlife was our modest contribution to the conservation effort. Each classroom in the school took its name after one beast or the other. And I was a tiger always ready to pounce. There were many adolescent goings on, however, and they possibly explain Mwaura’s misallocated anger against an innocent newspaper cutting.

A recent visit to the school upon the invite of the PTA reunited me with my classroom, with a blending of nostalgia and sorrow. The plaque outside the door remains, four and a half decades later. But many other things remain, too. The coat of paint on the walls is the same that we left in 1972. The school has not enjoyed a single stroke of the brush ever since this block was constructed in 1970, some 46 years ago. The offending bulletin board has worn out with time. It makes nonsense of the original reason for being there. The blackboard has lost its black. It has picked up potholes allover.