You can live honestly and still be happy

Parents talking to their children. As mentors and parents, we have a duty to inculcate values of decency, honesty, hard work and entrepreneurship in the young. PHOTO/FILE 

In Summary

• There is little difficulty in encouraging the young to study but it is another task altogether to convince them that hard work, discipline, honesty and self-sacrifice alone will bring success and prosperity in life.
• Young people are aware that ethnicity, who you know and the brown envelope are just as important as the certificate earned.
• Jubilee did a major audit of parastatals under Abdikadir Mohamed that recommended disbanding some and combining others into Government Owned Entities (GOEs).

By GABRIEL DOLAN
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January is the month parents dread.

A season of festivities is followed by desperation, frustration and anxiety as schools reopen and fees rise.

I’m always humbled by sacrifices parents make for their children to give them the best start in life: loans, animals sold and promises made.

Kenyans know the value of education and as pundits say, if you think it is expensive then try ignorance.

There is little difficulty in encouraging the young to study but it is another task altogether to convince them that hard work, discipline, honesty and self-sacrifice alone will bring success and prosperity in life.

The young believe merit alone will not guarantee them jobs or a comfortable life and they will illustrate this by examples from masonko and failed politicians around them.

Young people are aware that ethnicity, who you know and the brown envelope are just as important as the certificate earned.

That is the legacy and hierarchy of values that adults have burdened this generation with.

We have educated and inducted them into corruption from an early stage. As a result, impunity has infiltrated and desecrated the most sacred of spaces: the home, classroom and worship places.

REWARD MERIT

The Jubilee coalition promised to reward merit but has just been as guilty of nepotism, ethnicity and rewarding of cronies as its predecessors.

Jubilee did a major audit of parastatals under Abdikadir Mohamed that recommended disbanding some and combining others into Government Owned Entities (GOEs).

Yet, before a step had been taken towards implementation, the President and his deputy appointed 36 of their most loyal but unemployed supporters to head State bodies, most of which are moribund.

There was an immediate outcry from various ethnic groupings that their communities were not rewarded for delivering the March 4 vote to Jubilee.

The real worry, however, is that both Jubilee and the public are at the mercy of cliques, cronies and elite who have run and looted the country for decades.

Clearly, Jubilee does not represent a new way of governance and their appointments confirm deep suspicions of young people that ‘Kenya ina wenyewe’.

It also demonstrates that once you are part of the inner circle you can lose at the ballot, in courts and in the court of public opinion and still find a way back into luxury and privilege. Jubilee has brought cronyism and tribalism to a new digital level.

Thankfully, the private sector keeps Kenya afloat because it rewards merit and balances appointments.

VALUES FOR THE YOUNG

As mentors and parents, we have a duty to inculcate values of decency, honesty, hard work and entrepreneurship in the young.

You can live an honest life and be successful and happy.

Every new year, I make only one resolution; that I will neither bribe nor be bribed.

Thirty years later I have not broken that pledge or gone hungry despite frustration, harassment and inducement. ‘He who walks uprightly is safe but he whose ways are crooked falls into a pit’ (Proverbs 28:19) Try it!