Our national character is shaped by punishing offences, not determent

The last four months have been revealing. I have adjusted to easier days since the end of my stint as Director of the African Leadership Centre. As a result, I noticed Evolve Gymn and Spa located just 10-minute walk from where I stay.

Evolve is an all-round place where you can work out, enjoy the haircut and walk back home fresh and feeling on top of the world.

The 8-to-10 kilometre morning run on Saturday is a test of what to expect on October 30 when the Standard Chartered Marathon takes place and I have been prompted to register for it.

But I have also had time for silence; not the debilitating kind that fosters erasure and amnesia that our colleague, Yvonne Owuor, ably documents, but the golden silence that allows you to listen and learn.

It was in this silence that I read a post that summarised our national character. Referring to traffic matters, the entry wondered why the police and NTSA hide in bushes to spot and then punish speeding vehicles instead of activating deterrence procedures.

This is not an idle issue; it accurately reflects our national psyche. It is a psyche that would rather wait until an extremely horrible outcome happens in order to punish offenders than deter those offenders in advance.

It is a psyche that de-emphasises values and integrity and celebrates mediocrity, corruption, and vile abuse of everything that humanity should aspire for.

Unfortunately, we nurture this psyche in our institutions of learning, too. We have limited time to dialogue and convince. We prefer instant punishment or the threat of punishment.

More often, we prefer punishment that silences and extracts compliance rather than that which converts opponents to our side and makes them see the validity of our point of view.

CORPORAL PUNISHMENT

This explains why many have suggested that we need to reintroduce corporal punishment in schools to stop the burning of school buildings that we have witnessed recently.

The situation is even worse because our national officials and, indeed, many of us citizens think values belong in the realm of religion and are treated largely as Christian.

As such, we begin a discussion of values from a very flawed perspective as if one cannot have values even if they are not religious. Many of the religions we cite, however, have a horrible history of exploitation, war, racism, xenophobia and they explain some historic incidences where mass murder has been committed in the name of religious morality.

It is, therefore, refreshing that Mrs Priscilla Were, the founder of Butere High School, now renamed Glory Values School, will be launching the Kenya Values Trust this evening. As I thought about the school and trust this morning, I was excited to note that one of its core objectives is to “collaborate and lobby the relevant government agencies, including the ministry of Education and the institutions mandated with the development and approval of school curricula to introduce value education as a necessary component of the primary school and secondary schools’ curriculum” and “collaborate and lobby tertiary institutions and universities to develop value education models and include value education to their students”.

Above everything else, we know that values are not always taught or learned. They are lived.

Mrs Were has shown in her brief experience with Glory Values School that students and teachers in school can live values and still attain high grades in national examinations.

From a mean score of 2.1 in 2010, the school attained a mean score of 7.5 in 2015 and is still aiming higher.

To remind readers, this is a school that has no school rules and no school prefects; it is a school guided by school values and both students and teachers commit to live by those values. There is a big lesson here.

Godwin R. Murunga is a senior research fellow at the Institute for Development Studies at the University of Nairobi.