If the worst happens, come back and make Kenya great again
What you need to know:
- But I weep most for the young ones whose dreams are to study in the United States, for I believe that, in higher education at least, there is nothing to equal that offered by the universities there.
- There is no point moaning that the Americans have picked for their leader a man we don’t like but who reflects values they hold dear, which values, most certainly do not include Africa and its people’s welfare.
My heart goes out to those hapless Kenyans caught up in a maelstrom created by the victory of perhaps one of the most controversial figures to have ever won the American presidency.
Mr Donald Trump is slowly becoming an uncomfortable fact of life to many people, including Americans themselves. But the owners of the land have spoken and there is no way of going around that.
However, let’s look on the brighter side. Maybe that is the best way to deal with the brain-drain that has been extremely costly for our own country. If President Trump carried out his threat to expel all illegal immigrants from the United States, they could come back to their motherland, invest their earnings in manufacturing and industry, and end up creating jobs which are sorely needed here.
Professionals like doctors, nurses, teachers, agronomists, and even nuclear scientists would bring back their skills which we have been exporting with abandon. Indeed, Mr Trump and his new regime could be doing Kenya and other African countries a big favour. The law of unintended consequences could, in the end, help this continent grow.
Of course, there will be serious personal loss. Many Kenyans have lived in the United States for decades, and coming back home will be a traumatising experience.
For all practical purposes, these transplanted folk have become assimilated, and there is nothing left of their early lives in Kenya — not even relatives — to come back to. A policy that would allow them some form of citizenship would ease a great deal of desperation. After all, most are law-abiding and have never caused their hosts any harm.
But I weep most for the young ones whose dreams are to study in the United States, for I believe that, in higher education at least, there is nothing to equal that offered by the universities there. We are still a poor country and many Kenyans cannot afford American education. Whatever the new administration does, it should not pull the plug from under the education component in American foreign aid.
On the other hand, if it did happen, even that could turn out to be for the best. It is time we turned our universities into world class institutions, not fading carbon copies of the worst in the West. Perhaps this is the best chance we shall ever have, which is why we need our professors back so that they can help run our universities. And I am talking of those who hold security of tenure in great universities, not “professors” of the high school variety.
We must all the time be thinking of how to turn a looming catastrophe to our advantage. There is no point moaning that the Americans have picked for their leader a man we don’t like but who reflects values they hold dear, which values, most certainly do not include Africa and its people’s welfare.
But for Trump and others of his ilk to ignore Africa would be a grave mistake. America cannot afford to dispense with the fabled ‘soft-power’ that makes it great.
Not all the continent’s 1.2 billion souls can be so desperate as to seek economic refuge in the land of opportunity. Most of us have deep roots in countries that actually work, and if they don’t, we can make them better. Then we won’t have the Trumps of this world bullying us anymore.
In the meantime, it is still very early days and the new administration has not even got its bearings. As a result, it is idle to speculate on what might actually happen based on Mr Trump’s pronouncements during the campaigns. Politicians always do get carried away during those tense periods.
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From the end of the last season, the weatherman has been warning that most parts of the country will experience depressed rainfall. Others have sounded the alarm over time — that starvation would be the natural result of prolonged drought. It should then be assumed that county leaders, being the men and women on the ground, would have seen it coming.
Why then is it that governors in parts of the country are now crying out to the National Government and NGOs to lend a hand to prevent deaths? Must we always wait until it is almost too late, and after using all the tax-payer money on joyrides, to start extending begging bowls?
