No route to university with D-Minus

In our usual fashion of looking at issues purely from a political standpoint, many important facts have been left out of the discussions on Mombasa Governor Ali Hassan Joho’s high school examination performance and the ensuing debate about the genuineness of his university education certificates.

First, let us discount his protestations that poverty was to blame for his failure to do well in high school.

From all objective accounts about his early life, he comes across as a relatively advantaged young man compared to what many of us had to go through growing up in the torturous rural villages where the daily challenge was placing your head where the hyena would not grab it in the dead of the night.

Mombasa town would have been a dream place to grow up in for many reasons.

For one, there was wealth and opportunity all around you, and all you needed was to just figure out how to access it.

POOR GRADE

For us in the rural villages, we knew there was only one way out of the quagmire of poverty — hard work and good examination results, with some impeccable discipline thrown in.

As a result, even though most of us were in the first generation of the shoe wearers in our own families, we did well in our examinations.

And that’s the story of many, many Kenyans, including the watchman at the governor’s residence and the woman who serves tea in his office.

Many people perhaps do not know how bad a D-Minus score in the Form Four examination is — we probably don’t even know anyone else who came out of school with this dismal grade.

One teacher explained it to me very simply: If you enter the examination room and manage to write your name and Index Number clearly, then proceed to merely draw a lion (probably smoking something strange) on every paper, including Mathematics Paper 1, you probably will score a D-Minus, if you are able to get 45 per cent in only one paper.

JOHO'S UNIVERSITY DEGREES
I agree with the argument that such a dismal performance in high school is not the end of life.

But there is a way examination results define you, and that is why people work so hard to get good results, and if they falter in the first attempt, will endeavour to give it another shot until they crack it.

I can assure you that the architects of our Constitution promulgated in 2010, and the laws that domesticated it knew what they were doing when they set the academic qualifications for the county governor candidates.

In their wisdom, they refused to list the money you can splash around, your lucrative international connections, your capacity to intoxicate mobs with hate speech, and the audacity to publicly insult the Head of State as a consideration.

This notwithstanding, Mr Joho can close this matter very easily, really, and this will be good for the country so that we move on to more important debates.

Let him show us the route he took from his strong D- to his various university degrees.

ADMISSION TO UNIVERSITY
We expect him to say, for example, that armed with that certificate, he went to this and that institution, and earned this and that qualification, which allowed him to proceed to the other, and so on and so forth.

In other words, let him describe the route from the D- to the university graduation square.

University education is very well-defined. It is very clear how you enrol for admission, what you need to do to survive there, and how to qualify for graduation.

And this is universal. Indeed, it does not matter whether you went to India, Australia, Canada, Uganda, Tanzania, the United Kingdom or even the United States.

In Kenya, there are two known routes to the various public universities. With a C+ Form Four grade, you gain direct entry.

FORGERY

If, on the other hand, Mr Joho had worked a little harder and scored a D+, he would have needed to enrol for a certificate course, and if he had passed well (with a distinction or a credit) he could have taken a circuitous route through a series of diploma courses that would lead to university admission.

You will notice we are not talking here about a route that starts with a D-, and that is because we cannot find one.

Unless someone borrows a cousin’s school certificate or just forges one, you just cannot make it to university from this dismal grade.

The people who designed our education system assumed that when you are a D- fellow you would want to serve your country in capacities other than those that require some rigorous intellectual application.

Over to you, Mr Governor!

Mr Kiraithe is the Government Spokesman