Rising foreign onslaught calls for equipping youth with skills

There is a time for everything. If you want something out of a politician, this is the time to extract it from them.

Where I come from, men are disadvantaged in the battle of the sexes.

The children belong to the man. If the marriage breaks up, the wife leaves the husband to cook for and wash the children.

OBEDIENCE

So wives control their husbands by threatening to abandon them and the children.

It’s enough to keep most tough husbands obedient.

In other communities, it is different. A man packs a small bag, throws it into the boot of his Mercedes and drives off never to be seen again — until the graduation, whereupon he neatly reclaims his place of honour.

CARE
So maybe I am just culturally indoctrinated to worry about the future of our children.

This year, we are 48 million of us, of whom 25 million are under the age of 19.

Half of this country is made up of children who can’t exist on their own.

So we can choose to think the kind of country we want them to grow up in or we can just, so to speak, throw the small bag in the boot and go have a good time.

SOLUTION
Without care and left on the current trajectory, by 2050, Kenya will be a smoky, over-populated, violent, balkanised place, bone dry from global warming.

But we can have a clean, green, wet place teeming with productive and happy people.

This will not happen on auto-pilot. We must actually get up and do something about stuff that is not going right.

JOBS
Some 100,000 eager young Kenyans are going to university as freshmen every year.

Tens of thousands more are mature students returning to get an education that they missed in their youth.

Finding something to do for these teeming millions, equipping them with the skills and the patriotic, community-oriented attitude and protecting their contribution to the country, is one of the most important assignments for all of us.

LABOUR
This past week, I was speaking to an old friend, who is an architect.

And he was complaining about the wanton, thoughtless and plainly stupid importation of architectural skills, especially from China.

In the view of many professionals, Kenya has become like a village church; the door is never locked and you can come in and pray, or do whatever else you please, and no one will question you.

SKILLS

Our engineers, and we do have 6,000 of them, our architects, our quantity surveyors, the whole gamut of highly skilled people, whom we have spent a fortune training, are slowly being squeezed out of the market.

I remember visiting a Chinese labour camp in Nairobi to borrow scaffolding from a company that I knew.

The Africans who worked there were a frightened lot.

It was as if they were not in the African Republic of Kenya.

IMPORTS

There was a whole village of Chinese folk, which was nothing unusual. That is the formula.

China has 1.6 billion people and just like it is exporting everything, the export of labour is an important agenda.

What struck me is that everything on that site, including the scaffolding I had gone to borrow, was from China.

The kerosene lamps, the vegetables, everything, had come from China.

CLOTHES
If people are going to eat imported vegetables and use tin kerosene lamps, what happens to the vegetables we grow and the lamps we make?

One of my colleagues pointed out that our Armed Forces used to be some of the best dressed on the continent.

Their uniforms were made of a good material and fitted properly.

They were kitted out, my colleague said, by Manchester Outfitters, a local company.

TEXTILE

Now, our Air Force looks like its uniform has been bought from the same tailor who dresses the North Korean military.

If we are importing Chinese military uniform, what happens to our own textile firms?

How is it that some armies in the region buy Kenyan boots, while we are giving our people junk from Asia?

POLICIES
It does not take much for these people going up and down the country looking for votes to amend their manifestos to say that the first law they pass if elected is to require procuring authorities to prove that the skills or products they seek to import are unavailable locally.

Are there no Kenyans who can build Sigiri Bridge?

It’s time to secure the future of those 25 million young people.
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As I was writing, I was following on TV President Uhuru Kenyatta’s speech at the service for Maj-General (rtd) Joseph Nkaissery.

Mr Kenyatta’s grief was quite obvious and his sense of loss of a man he said “cared deeply for me, not as a President, but as a person” was quite obvious.

What caught my attention, however, was Mr Kenyatta’s strong assertion that the electoral outcome was unimportant; the important thing was peace and that Kenyans stayed together, united.

In a context where people are screeching “this country will burn!”, Mr Kenyatta looked very sad, but also very presidential.

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