The Kenya Certificate of Primary School Examination results released last week were never going to be a surprise. Boys outscored girls in Maths and Science, which is very bad for the boy child since lawyers and PR executives make more money than mathematics professors.
In general, there were more boys in the top-ten slots than girls. And quite predictably, children from North Eastern Province didn’t bask in the limelight. Evidently, it’s practically impossible to keep the brain firing on all cylinders when the tummy is empty. A cursory glance at the names of top performers — Oloo, Imali, Njoroge, Chemtai— is proof that you need food in the belly to calculate fractions.
Stage experts
What is hardly surprising is that even before the minister exited the stage, ‘experts’ were already attributing the girls’ ‘poor’ performance to the old, boring inequality debate.
True, there are areas where perverts — most of them teachers — knock up entire generations of schoolgirls. But in all honesty, the chances of a straight ‘A’ girl falling for the whims of a drunken primary school teacher are zero.
Matter of hard work
The argument here being that while girls are cooking, the boys are studying. This is utter balderdash since it doesn’t explain why girls in urban settings — where enlightened parents employ house helps to do all the chores — don’t overwhelmingly outperform boys.
Neither does it explain why some feisty little girls in Pokot, Marsabit and Tana River punch their way to Alliance Girls against all odds and head straight to the University of Nairobi.
Girls need to reflect on how Professors Eddah Gachukia, Wangari Maathai and Olive Mugenda learnt and excelled, pummelling the boys in their class long before anyone knew about the girl child.
They simply scaled the heights because they have the brains and they worked hard at it — not because some NGO activist kept lying to them that they were disadvantaged.
Nothing lowers a girl’s self esteem more than to be routinely reminded that boys, and men for that matter, have a head start in life.
The secret lies in determination and hard work. However much the playing field is ‘levelled’, lazy, dimwitted girls will flop like daft boys, irrespective of how much pampering they get.
Yes, she can
In this age where women head households, blue chip companies and universities, make millions, command police divisions and sit in the Cabinet and on the Court of Appeal, this girl child nonsense is rotten fruit. Young Asha Mohamed Haji, at number 21 in North Eastern Province, is proof that you can’t keep a fighter down. Now, that’s a girl who doesn’t give a hoot about the girl child.
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