there was an urgent need for African
professionals.
To bridge the gap as quickly as possible the
East African countries decided to create
centers of excellence in their constituent
campuses of the University of East Africa
to train the necessary manpower needed to
run the independent countries.
Somebody decided that we needed lawyers,
doctors and engineers. Tanganyika trained
lawyers in Dar es Salaam, Uganda trained
doctors in Makerere and Kenya trained
engineers in Nairobi as these were the new
hot careers which were supposed to attract
the very best talent that the countries could
produce.
What is strange for Ochieng is to realize
that over fifty years after independence the
careers of choice seem to be the very same
as during the inception of independence.
This is even after it became clear that the
countries need other competencies over and
above those three to run a country.
But of greater importance is for us to take
stock of the manpower we have developed
over the period to spur the growth of the
nation and find out how we have fared.
Are the highly competitive courses at the
university indicative of the needs of the
nation?
A lot of those that became lawyers also
ended up in parliament and hence are
responsible for the new constitution we
have today. They agitated to have the
constitution changed and spearheaded its
drafting to produce what they claim is the
most progressive constitution in the world.
If this is the best they could do then they
score poorly as hardly had the document
been promulgated than there was a clamor
to change it. This sterling document the
product of many hours of deliberation was
faulty at birth.
The checks and balances were so intricate
and the separation of powers so effective
that they stripped the country of any
effective leadership. It seems in this country
the ultimate power lies with the MCA
and those semi-literate individuals run the
country.
Obviously some of the core courses in law
do not include administration and finance
since they did not figure out that there
is a correlation between the size of the
government and the cost of running it. They
have saddled us with a financial behemoth
96 MAL30/19 ISSUE
We have megaproj-
ects in Africa yet
none are ever car-
ried out by Afri-
cans who passed
the same engi-
neering courses as
those from the de-
veloped countries.
Why do we call our
people engineers if
they cannot build
a road or construct
a dam?
that is drowning all of us.
The other lawyers became magistrates and
judges and this is where we saw the true
meaning of misuse of intelligence. The
judiciary has been and continues to be the
cesspool of corruption and it is common
knowledge our judges are for hire.
So bad is the situation in Kenya that at
one time the majority of the members of
the Supreme Court were under corruption
investigation and one wonders who was
going to judge them as they are the highest
court in the land.
A sizeable balance of our learned friends
has conducted itself so dishonorably that
to talk of an honest lawyer is nearly an
oxymoron in Kenya. If this is what has
become of some of our brightest then it
is no wonder we are in such a mess as a
country.
We have megaprojects in Africa yet none
are ever carried out by Africans who
passed the same engineering courses as
those from the developed countries. Why
do we call our people engineers if they
cannot build a road or construct a dam?
In our lifetime we have had many occasions
to laugh at terrible Japanese cars, ugly
Indian cars, unreliable Taiwanese parts,
cheap Chinese products but today they
are major players in our economy and
they improved over time. What have our
engineers done?
We have taken our best brains and
turned them into desktop dreamers who
cannot conceive of any idea that will
move Africans ahead technologically.
We are more dependent on our past
colonial masters today than we were at
independence.
We are of course tired at drawing the
parallel between the Asian tigers that
were at economic par with Africa at
independence if not worse and who have
created economic miracles while we still
wallow in poverty due to non-use of our
top brains.
Brain drain has been the scourge of
Africa and we have our best brains
employed elsewhere and not solving
our milliards of problems that remain
unresolved because Africans do not trust
each other enough to allow ourselves to
create home grown solutions.
Most pitiful is the lot of our doctors who
we spend millions to train only to end up
underpaying them which is a sure recipe
that they shall move to the private sector
while the country’s proletariat continues
to suffer and die unnecessarily.
Our hospitals have no equipment and
the facilities to diagnose and treat
diseases and therefore our highly skilled
doctors are underutilized and cannot
meet the threshold required to claim we
have a caring nation that looks after its
populace.
When they are forced to go into private
practice by an uncaring government,
they are pushed beyond the reach of
the common mwananchi and the circle
of poverty is never broken since the
expensive training on our best brains is
wasted with no facilities.
No country can afford to have its best
brains so mis-utilized and hope that
the country will prosper. To deliver on
the big four agenda requires that proper
manpower planning is done, adequate
training is undertaken and facilities are
availed.
The last word is that our developmental
aspiration will remain pipe dreams as
long as Africans are unwilling to trust
each other and to learn from mistakes
made by ourselves. We need to break the
colonial mental shackles that bind us as
tightly as they did at independence. The
ball is squarely in our court!