Get off the broken road to ‘hustlehood’

(Photo Courtesy)

We tend to think of hustlers as victims of human injustice; people who’ve been denied economic opportunities.

Some argue that hustlers don’t work hard enough, right from school. Our teachers even prod us to study hard lest we became hustlers. They often name the ‘professions’ that attract hustlers. Some of us worked hard and escaped this ‘curse of hustling’.

We also become hustlers because we lack information on economic opportunities, even when we have the capability and intellect to thrive. A boy or girl in a rural area might not know of Rhodes or Fulbright scholarships, despite being an A student. They may not have heard of the stock exchange.

One thought that with mobile Internet and bundles, youngsters would seek opportunities beyond our borders. Instead, they seem to spend most of their time on personal issues and muchene; they’re not talking about the next big firm after Apple Inc, or what will come after M-Pesa.

After school, we’re not willing to find out how to become affluent, preferring to talk about the rich. We are afraid to start small and grow. It’s one of the reasons corruption and outright cheating thrive.

Whether we failed to work hard enough or to seek opportunities, falling through the cracks into hustlehood is not fun.

It became clear after the rains when I watched hustlers removing their shoes to walk into flooded rivers. When I saw hustlers without umbrellas walking in the rain. Seeing a young girl holding a newborn baby and waiting for a bus in the rain along Thika Road was moving. It reminded me of our grass-thatched house that leaked after the rains.

The weather always brings out the worst elements of being a hustler. When it rains, you’re drenched. When it’s hot and dry, you’re covered in dust, either from cars or from strong winds. You also go hungry as food prices rise.  

No initiative

The suffering of the hustler demands that we take care of the vulnerable members of society who either didn’t work hard enough when it mattered, or just lacked opportunities.

This is why we have a taxation system. It wouldn’t be fair to have a hustler drenched by rain at age 20 and have him or her still at it at 60. If we build work ethics early in life and make opportunities available to all, we shall reduce the number of hustlers and their suffering. After all, opportunities have never been one of our scarce resources.

Sadly, lots of young men and women are taking the road to hustlehood.

I’ve listened to parents talking of their children who don’t take any initiative, who refuse to pay fees so they can be sent home from school, who won’t do any household chores and spend their time watching TV.

While school and our socio-political system carry the blame for aiding hustlehood, parenting plays a role, too. We take too much care of our kids, failing to ‘abandon them’ like hens or other animals.

They’re growing up waiting for ‘others’ to take care of them. They never learn to take risks and face the realities of life. As children, we’d take livestock to graze away from home, and if it rained, we learnt to build shelters and make raincoats and makeshift umbrellas.

One Kenyan told me how she took her Form 2 niece to the shop by car after it started raining. Would her niece have dissolved in the rain? It seems when one road to hustlehood closes, we open others knowingly or unknowingly.

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