Life doesn’t offer holiday tuition

By Edward Indakwa

I walked into a leading hospital with a crippling sore throat and was quickly diagnosed with chronic bronchitis and sentenced to a fistful of antibiotics at considerable cost to my hind pocket.

Because of the nature of my job then, I kept aggravating my ‘chronic bronchitis’ and quaffing antibiotics as prescribed by that doctor.

Two years later, however, I saw a different doctor.

He was a proper doctor this one – thick rimmed spectacles, complete with an unhurried, professional look, even if he didn’t smell of boiling syringes.

After a careful examination, he asked, “Who lied to you that you have chronic bronchitis? You just have a sore throat. Go and buy a mouthwash!” And that was it. I was healed!

A year later, when I picked up another nasty throat infection, I was flat broke, so I walked into a pharmacist and met this lovely Indian pharmacist.

“Antibiotics?” she gasped. “All you need is some lozenges worth Sh200!” And oh yes, I was healed!

Impeccable credentials

You get it? Same symptoms, three different doctors but three forms of treatment – one of them apparently medically wrong, but cripplingly expensive.

That, I think, is why I have problems with holiday tuition. With tuition, you convert an average child into an above average student who goes on to secure a decent a job.

Unfortunately, life doesn’t offer holiday tuition; reason employers get shocked to learn that the fellow they hired with impeccable credentials is, after all, just an average worker who can’t function without ‘tuition’.

With exams being as competitive as they are, school principals do everything in their power to ensure that students excel.

You can’t blame them because the alternative is getting beaten by illiterate villagers and vilified by politicians.

So what happens is that they burn the midnight oil to clear a four-year syllabus in three years, spending the last year of school revising.

That is the only way 120 out of 135 students score straight ‘A’s.

School syllabus

But as we celebrate the ‘winners’ and curse the ‘losers’, we forget that curriculum planners weren’t high on muratina when they figured out that a school syllabus should be covered in four years.

The whole thing is akin to pumping an athlete with steroids. They can’t run without them, but the side effects are crazy, as female weightlifters who have been germinating hair in the wrong places because of using steroids belatedly learn.

Folks, a zebu may take eons to mature. Its body weight is small, but its meat is tastier. Its milk is minute in volume, but sweeter and it feeds on next to nothing.

Conversely, the top grade cow gives tones of milk, but only if you pump it up with holiday tuition, er, sorry, rich feeds like Lucerne, which the zebu has never heard of.

I could, therefore, equate the results of holiday tuition to the agriculture show where farmers are shown gigantic cabbages grown on liquid nitrates, but which turn out watery and tasteless when served.

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How can we get rid of matatus?

When I visited Nairobi in 1994 after a three-year absence, all phone booths had been converted into advertising billboards. Everyone, it appeared, was running a clearing and forwarding firm – briefcase of course – or some phantom outfit supplying stationary.

That was the golden age when one purchased a carton of ball pens, delivered it to a Government office, collected a cheque and walked out with his supplies. These he would recycle and resupply over and over till he got bored of the circus and made a final delivery.

There was palpable hunger on the streets. You could feel it in the hordes of faceless Kenyans who shuffled along city streets or lay spread-eagled in Jevanjee Gardens as empty tummies rumbled like helicopter engines.

Every city building seemed to boast of a photocopying machine in severe state of disrepair. There was so much photocopying going on it was frightening.

And Government was all over the place – prying, ordering, warning, arresting, ordering for photocopies and generally doing everything possible not to offer services.

Applying for a passport was almost criminal. The Nairobi PC was so powerful that he was a household name. And fixing a faulty landline was so complex that a team of ten workers were dispatched to nibble on overtime payments for six hours.

These days, a police officer can call you ‘sir, photocopying is no longer a business and telephone booths... what the heck are those? No one also seems to supply stationery to Government departments anymore and few people remember hearing a landline ring or the Nairobi PC’s name. Now, how do we get rid of matatus?