A number of Kenyans are still smarting from the damage to their car inflicted by rioting University of Nairobi (UoN) students the other day. Their windscreens were smashed, their side mirrors yanked away, with some villains even jumping on the bonnet to do a jig, while leering and jeering at them.
Unless their insurance policy covers riots and incidents of insurrection, they have been left holding the baby, in a manner of speaking, for a cause they neither know of, nor cares precious little about. That student elections can be cause to visit chaos on a public that has its own problems to tackle, including funding public universities, must rankle the citizenry enough to want to strangle miscreants who engage in such mindless violence.
At the centre of the chaos was the contention, as if the rest of us care, that omnipresent and career student leader Babu Owino won irregularly. It was gratifying that law enforcement agents acted promptly and contained the students, who have demonstrated that if they have been treated like brash upstarts to be lectured at and pontificated to, it was perfectly in order.
I know of several captains of industry and employers who are careful not to employ UoN graduates, just because of the perennial behaviour of venting displaced aggression on motorists and members of the public whenever they have grievances. Do the students know that the hapless motorists whose windscreens they smash could be the same guys they face in interviews possibly months down the line?
Are they aware the fellow whose car they stone is the same guy they may have to confront while looking for jobs? Meanwhile, UoN honchos waded into the tear gas to aver that the student polls were above board. Really. So, why did they elicit such agitated and frenzied reactions? That aside, have the university authorities asked themselves why Babu Owino has been an official of Sonu for the last donkey years?
What’s his interest? Is it in order that the bloke retains his position, almost as if it is hereditary? I know the chap has appeared on TV several times to stutter that he is a bona fide student and all that jazz. Fine. What he has not come clean on concerns his funding, which appears to be extremely well-oiled. Unless he is a Bill Gates in the making, where did the rumoured millions he allegedly dishes around come from?
Is he a sort of entrepreneur guru that we know nothing about? And while we are at it, what does he do for his funders? Put another way, what is in it for his funders in the student elections, in which he is said to spend millions? Whose money does he spend and to achieve what?
If university authorities have not given this issue serious thought, then their power to read must be seriously compromised, so to speak. For the record, given the nature of less than intellectually-grounded fellows leaving public universities in recent times, where do the chaps find time to throw stones, when they cannot even articulate their grievances cogently? What is all the yelling in aid of, I ask?
The images we see on TV of students sweating in the sun and frothing at the mouth to yell obscenities at authorities is hardly one of intellectuals in the making. Maybe, I am wrong but every time I see the fellows displaying false bravado and chanting tired slogans, only to scamper like frightened deer at the sight of anti-riot police is not exactly that of a generation waiting to take this country to the next economic or technology level. My take is that they have a lot to do and a long way to go to redeem their tattered images. It starts in the mind. I rest my case.
No comments:
Post a Comment