The Laptop Project - a hypothetical perspective

Having dedicated one and another blog to the laptop project without getting closer to unraveling it,  it is perhaps time to think outside the box. The thinking below is hypothetical and any similarities readers may draw to any real life characters should be considered as purely accidental.

The scene opens with four characters huddled around a table in some exclusive hotel in the outskirts of Nairobi. The first character, known simply as Professor, looks as uncomfortable as the second character seated next to him.  The second character is known as the Expert, and they are both facing two other characters across the table.

These two characters are called “Mr. You_R_Q” and “Mr. TEA_&_B” respectively.  They both seem very agitated. They are pushing  the Professor and the Expert to explain why the Laptop Tender has not yet been awarded and yet the pupils have been waiting for the laptops since January 2014.

The Professor explains that they had to get the conceptual framework right before anything else.  He is quickly supported by the Expert who explains that they had to work out the details of what will be taught, how it will be taught, when it will be taught, the laptop specifications and...

He is quickly cut short by Mr. You_R_Q.  Mr. You_R_Q tells the two that they are being un-necessarily academic.  He tells them to just buy the laptops and figure out the rest of the details thereafter.  Mr. TEA_&_B nods aggressively and adds that if the two cannot deliver the laptop before the end of the term, he will go to the house on the hill and recommend their quick replacement.

The Professor now gets really offended and reminds the two that he was actually doing well wherever he was before some spirits convinced him to take on the current job.  He tells the two that in his previous posting, once you fixed the conceptual framework, everything else always fell neatly into place. But now he finds that he is being pushed to work without any framework...conceptual or otherwise.

Mr. You_R_Q now pretends to empathize and asks Mr. TEA_&_B not to introduce replacement  or reshuffling topics at the moment. He then turns to Mr. Expert  and asks him how much time his technical team needs to give the Professor the conceptual framework for the project.

Mr. Expert says they needed at least one year to properly engage with stakeholders such as teachers, curriculum developers, content developers, e-publishers, the ….Mr. TEA_&_B again quickly interjects and asks the expert if he had heard of and read the Jubilee manifesto.

Before the Expert could answer, Mr. TEA_&_B tells Mr. You_R_Q that clearly, they were now wasting their time and they should just leave. But before they leave, he turns to the good Professor and tells him to keep his lines open because he is likely to hear very soon from the tenant on the big house on the hill.

Two weeks later, after working non-stop under increasing pressure, the Professor and the Expert eventually announce the winning bidder for the LapTop Project.  Unfortunately, this does nothing to reduce the pressure – it actually shoots up exponentially.  Now even the parliamentary committee is suddenly very interested in the Laptop project and they are issuing very unfriendly statements.

The Professor looks at the Expert and loudly wonders – does the Constitution say somewhere that they were supposed to be independent, non-political technocrats? How do people ever get to work around this place? He then places a call to his former workplace – just to confirm that his teaching role will always be there whenever he is over and done with the complexities of the Kenyan civil service. 

Mr Walubengo is a lecturer at the Multimedia University of Kenya, Faculty of Computing and IT. Twitter : @jwalu