Is Kenya a nation full of liars and cheats?

One can be forgiven for thinking Kenya is a nation full of liars and cheats. Our very idea of what it involves to make it in life is an inherent desire to cheat, lie and if possible steal. This idea is so pervasive in Kenyan society that the Ministry of Education has dedicated Sh1.5 billion to stop exam cheats. This Sh1.5 billion won’t go to school feeding programmes, neither will it go to bolstering the free education system; it will go to stopping 18 and 14-year-olds from cheating in exams.

One is tempted to ask if these children have parents, because to stop me from cheating, all you needed to do was threaten to tell my mother. But today’s children are in cahoots with their parents to defraud the education system. Parents, I am told, are willing to fly to the UK just to get a chance for their children to cheat.

Entire schools are on cheating watch lists, which is funny, because, how then are such institutions schools? What do they teach? Why have teachers if all you want to do in the end is cheat? What are the benefits of cheating in an exam? Do you cease to be dumb because a piece of paper says so? Are you clever by virtue of an exam, or are you clever by virtue of hard work? Which brings me to the Kenyan fascination with the certificate more than the content.

Recently I was told a story that highlighted this issue for me. A certain young lady, let’s call her Nancy, an orphan at 17 years of age. Having no way of getting into tertiary education for lack of fees, she devised an ingenious way of attending school. She enrolled in different institutions for a semester.

She would stay all semester long and then fail to sit the exam because it is only during exam time that the issue of fees was really enforced. She did this until she completed courses which were the equivalent of a diploma; no paperwork, just classes attended. In our certificate-obsessed society, she is not educated. But that raises the question; why do we go to school?

Gruesome example

The objective of going to school is not to obtain a certificate; it is to learn, and you can’t cheat yourself into learning. You can’t lie that you know, you can’t lie to be competent and, worse, you can’t lie to yourself. An A in KCSE will not spare you and your child if you are part of the ravages of foolishness.

Such an exercise can only reap the wind and success will elude you. If parents and teachers - the guardians of virtue and morality - are at the forefront of cheating, small wonder then that Kenyan adults cheat as if it is a career. Allow me to give a gruesome example; the recent accident by the Homeboyz bus is the culmination of a culture of cheating and stealing. When the 'Michuki rules' first came in, bus owners and drivers immediately set themselves the task of finding ways of manipulating speed governors.

To earn an extra buck, they put our lives at risk. But we were happy because we would get to our destinations faster. We cheered when safety belts became dirty and unnecessary seat accessories. We also complained bitterly whenever police would arrest us for not wearing safety belts, and we have WhatsApp groups to warn us where the police with Alcoblow are.

Speed governors

We love to beat the system, even if it means we are trying to cheat death. We are happy to cheat. The cost of this cheating on our roads is 10,000 lives a year, entire families and the hopes of a generation wiped away. The cost on our economy is also huge. Since the Michuki days, we have had three versions of speed governors, each needing to be changed because Kenyans cheat. The Ministry of Transport and the Kenya Bureau of Standards have yet to launch the latest version of speed governors, which means the bus could have been without one, because Kenyans cheat.

The bus company could have cheated on insurance, on the number of passages and the comfort of passengers; some, we are told, were sitting on crates. All this because Kenyans love to cheat. We, the passengers of the proverbial Kenyan bus, clap when our drivers cheat and cry when innocent lives are lost.

Look at our construction industry. Many malls, and now apartment blocks, are being brought down. The owners are complaining that they got all the paperwork and as such we should legitimise their cheating by not tearing down the buildings. They argue that they invested money... give us a break! Someone has to pay the price for a better Kenya and that someone is you and me.

I always wondered how many cheaters were on the front pages of newspapers in December, being lifted high by parents who were celebrating successfully hoodwinking the public. An insult to our collective intelligence, celebrated right in front of our eyes.

So much was the cheating that some schools are unable to shine as they used to without the exam stealing. Now the question must be asked; if we celebrate a KCPE cheat, doesn’t that then explain our celebrating election cheats? It also explains why the IEBC still has the same chairman even though the courts called the previous election a sham and a farce.

As such, generally speaking, we educate cheats, elect cheats and then get shocked when we get cheated out of wealth, life and limb. Kenya needs to look at itself in the mirror and realise that our insanity will catch up with us and if it won’t, Bus Kenya is headed the Homeboyz bus way, and, folks, we have no speed governor.

Mr Bichachi is a communication consultant. [email protected]