KANYI GIOKO: Success to all the 3.46 million candidates – The future is all yours

Kanyi Gioko (Ph.D.), Career Educationist, Researcher, Digital Content and Curriculum Developer./COURTERSY

Greeting Kenyans, yet again we are entering the season of our end of year end-of-course examinations and assessments. This year, we have 3.46 million candidates who are registered to write their examination in various levels of the national assessments.

We wish all KPSEA, KJSEA and KCSE candidate the best of the best as they embark on this journey of crossing a critical milestone in their lives. This is a great moment in your lives, young Kenyans, go for it. 

While we are at this, it is also noteworthy that this is also the same period of time where adults tend to misbehave the most, all driven by a tendency and interests that, in often cases, do not have the best will of the candidates at heart.

Allow me to walk through the scene as I touch on the different characters and their shenanigans that we can comfortably do without. Primarily is the proxy ambition by parents. Dear parents, this is not your examinations, this is not your life, and quite certainly this is not your assessments.

I have the privilege of being in a group of some parents, and boy, the tempers, the fear, and the jittery nature of the forthcoming examination are more pronounced in the parents than in the candidates themselves. Stop the charade and take a deep breath; practically, this has nothing to do with you. I know your ambitions were extinguished many years ago, and your dream career flew out of the window when you missed an appointment with your dream career or scholarship. Your child is not your second chance; your child is not the clan's redemption nor the community flag bearer for unfulfilled dreams.

Let the children be children, allow them to live and fulfil their own dreams, chart their own path, and grow themselves into the 21st century space. If you exhibit this kind of tendency, then you are a dream killer and you deserve to be checked. 

The second group of misbehaving parents are those who have invested in schools or educational spaces. This lot tends to marshal and treat the young Kenyans as business commodities.

A respectable number of them are known to register several educational centres and filter the pupils like graded coffee beans into categories. The very best are herded into one paddock aptly named using elite school names or group of something or the other or something academically glorious and catchy.

These unscrupulous parents cum parochial entrepreneurs always aim to force an impressive performance from these filtered cohorts with the practical evil aim of boosting their businesses more than uplift the learners’ talents, careers, and dreams. This is dubious capitalism at its worst, and it is not any different from an academic 21st century slave trade.

Please pardon me for the choice of words, but again, a doctor should never choose which patients to treat and which ones to isolate and ignore. If you are good at what you do, as you purport on mass media, then stop all these back-stage cloak-and-dagger activities and do everything professionally and in the light. 

The next category of parents is the crookest type, who aid, those who facilitate and provide resources to accommodate examination cheating. Just imagine a whole adult of sound mind, putting together people, money and plans to help weaken the future of Kenya and the very foundation of our modern civilisation in the pursuit of doctored outcomes for their children. This is the saddest lot of them all, for there exists no other avenue for breaking a generation and watering down the very fundamentals of our existence as a strong nation.

The nation requires professionals to stand on solid ground. We need future engineers, doctors, teachers, agrovet, you name it, to not only keep us afloat as a nation but also to move towards a better place for the generations to come. What becomes of the harvest if the seeds are contaminated during the planting exercise? Have we all ever considered the moral trojan horse we are planting in our children by doing all these uncouth activities in the misguided belief that we are helping them? 

Dear Kenyan candidates, wherever you are, kindly distance yourself from all these kinds of people, even if they are your own parents. Please note that in my narrative, I have used parents and adults all across and not students, because you the children are innocent.

Please focus on the sweat of your brow and write those papers from your hearts and minds, you are the future generations and hope for the beautiful country of Kenya.

It does not matter what grade you score, as long as it is a clean grade, then you are the chosen one for the ultimate task of taking us forward as a people as a prosperous nation, do not squander the opportunity to be a clean seed.

We cannot grow a strong, beautiful nation on contaminated seeds, deceit and wheeler dealing. You are the generation that must break these unhealthy habits exhibited by your parents at whatever level they come to you, say a big no to examination malpractice and a big no to your dream killers.

Success in your examinations as you take this beautiful country of Kenya to the next level. 

God bless you. God bless Kenya.

The writer is a career educationist, researcher, and digital content and curriculum developer. He comments on topical issues