‘D’ grades are degrading

All of last week, the debate about what getting a ‘D’ – plain, plus or minus – means raged on social media. And I am here with the last word for all wannabes (including those who wanted ‘B’s but scored a ‘D’) on this D-bate.

Getting a ‘D’ in KCSE, or anything, is nothing to be proud of and certainly not worth writing home about, let alone shouting from the rooftops. A ‘D’ in KCSE simply means that one was examined in various subjects they had four years to study – and the System has found your understanding of these subjects severely wanting.

Plain and simple – there is no gloss or spin one can put to any sort of ‘D.’

Unless your schooling was disrupted by bandit raids in Turkana-land or you spend most of your school years as a teenager roaming in Eastleigh to look for homemade guns to harass wananchi with or one suffers from a rare case of narcolepsy and simply cannot keep their eyes open during class lessons ( I used to suffer from narcolepsy during ‘Geography’ in high school, and lapse into a coma during Chemistry), I simply cannot understand how anyone would go to school and emerge with a ‘D.’

Then be very ‘wannabe’ and happy about it. Why? If ‘F’ is for flop because you, wannabe student, did not take the examinations and ‘E’ for ‘Empty headed’ because you took the Examinations but your head was devoid of any answers, then we must agree that ‘D’ lies somewhere in the spectrum of ‘dim’ to ‘daft.’

There is this famous local musician called William, a real wannabe, who lied to one of our sister magazines that he had gotten a ‘B+’ a few years ago in his KCSE before it was unearthed that he had scored a ‘D+.’ But perhaps he was not lying to the papers, after all.

Maybe that morning after going for his result slip, he had passed by a blood bank, and gotten the results of his blood group ( B positive) mixed up with his exam grades ( D+). (That does not explain, however, why he later said his blood group, when donating blood on the streets for the Garissa students, is ‘D plus’).

Jokes aside, the only reason you are asked all these questions in Form Four is to sieve out the ‘stupid’ students from their smarter counterparts and then use those grades to cluster them into Campus in preparation for future careers.

For example, I am not dumb, but if I had been unfiltered and gone to do ‘Chem’ in college, no doubt I’d have titrated nitro-glycerine through my pipette, boiled it on the Florence flask thus accidentally blowing the lab up into Thy Kingdom Come.

You cannot have wannabes mixing up all sorts of stuff, willy nilly, in the laboratory. When it comes to life, though, that is a whole different story; it can be a new can of fish.

As in the case of Mombasa County Governor, Hassan ‘the Sultan’ Joho.

First of all, the fellow speaks very well, not at all like someone who scored a ‘D minus’ in school, so we will assume he was one of those ‘wannabe’ students who would rather be swimming in the sea than studying for examinations. Then, let’s be honest, the man has done a good job down in Mombasa, for which I would give him a ‘B+.’

Not the ‘A’ that I’m going to give to Masaku governor Dr. ‘A’lfred Mutua, or the ‘E’ I’ll give the fellow whose name begins with that letter, and why not with all the litter that every Nairobian now encounters? Yet that chap has solid degrees (and even knows who the Sec Gen of the United Nations is).

How does that knowledge keep our county clean? Better a ‘chewing gum’ with great CDF credentials in his former constituency as our governor than one who chews gum during TV interviews and can even stick that gum on the bench when he is done – because of his bad, crude wannabe’s manners (lack of).

Now you know how a Nairobian should vote in the upcoming city elections.

As a Kenyan, though, you should ask yourself how you will vote as a citizen – based on security issues, food security, cost of living, debt and election promises (made and broken) from the April of 2013. Are we better off now, nationally, than we were four years ago? What grade would you give government, from ‘A’ to ‘E’ on these issues?

As for those other things, it is said Jimmy Gait is working on two new songs to address wannabe D-stress.

‘Yesu ndiye classmate unahitaji’ and ‘Mungu haitishi result slip.’