Dear Kampala Express

In a recently published Facebook Post, Timothy Kalyegira the person behind Kampala Express, you the Facebook Page or now are you a media entity that has become increasingly popular in Uganda’s social media circles, opined that there is actually nothing wrong with Uganda’s Education System.

Not that I believe that it’s all messed up but to say that there is nothing wrong is to say all is okay and that we should settle for less, accept everything as it is and not strive to improve anything because as things were, so are they and so should they always be. Unfortunately, that is what Mr. Kalyegira thinks, a gentleman whom I hold in high regard.

Yet, his chain of thinking does not surprise me because going by what Kalyegira says I am now convinced the colonialists achieved what they sought to achieve by handing to us a British School System without adapting it to our specific needs and circumstances- inculcating into us the notion that they are superior and we are inferior.

Kalyegira, albeit unknowingly, affirms this fact when he speaks in defense of the the British school system and its imposition on Ugandans.

“Uganda, like most of Tropical Africa, ‘was not going’ to be an industrial power in 1910. The country was just being built up from scratch, training clerks to take up the future roles for the basic desk work in public administration and the civil service.”

Note the use of ‘Uganda…was not going to be an industrial power’ like it was a predestined fact and truth. Why was Uganda “not going” to be an industrial power? Was it some form of absolute impossibility?

Interestingly, Kalyegira doesn’t notice the kind of mental slavery the education system he is advocating for has subjected him to and I cannot help but laugh at the irony when he says “there was nothing wrong with that.”

Really? In all honesty is there nothing wrong with a system that trains us to be mere clerks and nothing more? Just pause and think about it.

But apparently as per the veteran Journalist, what we appear to have failed to do, or progressively failed at, is sustaining these “clerical skills” and it is the problem with our country, not the system that teaches us to be clerks.

As if that’s not ridiculous enough, Kalyegira recommends in his conclusive remarks

“Knowing Ugandans and other Africans as we generally are, even if we taught nothing but sciences in school, we would still not have the discipline to do what the Europeans and East Asians are creating in precision technology.

So we might as well try and perfect the area where we have the best chance, that is the arts, particularly English which happens to be our official language and, fortunately, the dominant language of the Internet.

Then maybe we could find a place in the world market by translating documents, working at call centres and so on.”

What Kalyegira is suggesting is that we are not good enough and that all Ugandans/ Africans (including you and I) are a lazy lot of human beings who lack the ability to invent new solutions to the challenges we face or even come up with inventions that that will be used world over. Now this kind of deplorable mental conditioning is the reason why there is need for a complete overhaul of our education system.

We need an education system that tells us we are good enough to compete anywhere in the world in any area of expertise, and not one that conditions us to the thinking that the best we can do with our lives is be clerks while the rest of the world is inventing what we shall use as clerks and employing us.

Aside from that, Kalyegira rants about the young people’s inability to write and construct correct grammatical sentences in what I was told by my High School Headmaster is the queen’s language ( note: it is not the Omukama or the Kabaka’s language). If only I was one of those young people who can’t construct correct grammatical sentences in the “queen’s language”, I would have written this response in that language that is a pain in Kalyegira’s neck.

By the way, before we write off those people who can’t write good English, like Steven Covey suggests, let us seek to understand.  Let us seek to understand why they prefer writing “thx” to “thanks” before we demand to be understood.  Perhaps it is a search for identity and they are trying to coin their own language with which they can identify since they can neither identify with the English Language because it will always be foreign to them nor their respective mother tongues.

In our homes we the elite, the products of this system who were schooled in institutions like Kings College Buddo, Kiira College Butiki, Mt. St Mary’s College Namagunga and so forth could not teach them their respective mother tongues but forced them to speak English from the time they were born.  So when they “speak with British or American accents” they are trying to fit into the shoes we forced them to wear. It therefore should not be surprising that when we go past the accents all that we are left with is the appalling writing “that the Kampala Express does battle with daily from incoming comments.”

But even then, it is not true that nothing will become of the younger generation unless they learn to write good English. Actually, what we need to do is tap into the resource that there is in the language they speak however cryptic it sounds to our ears.

We should not be imposing but persuasive in our approach. Let’s try to learn, communicate and inspire them in that language. It is the only way we can tap into their creative abilities, not by teaching them to cram properly constructed English sentences just because “cramming of the right things is not necessarily a bad thing.”

If indeed we are smart enough, let us learn. Why should it be difficult for us to learn and adopt their language after all we are that smart? Or is their language that difficult to learn? If it is, then well, it means they are smarter. So smart that they can invent a language which we cannot learn or intelligent folk like Kalyegira are not comfortable speaking and yet easily understandable amongst them.

That’s why, if we sit back and start to think that because we speak and write very good English we are better off than they are, we may be shocked. What the young people are capable of achieving in their generation, in spite of their inability to construct correct sentences is beyond what some of us imagine. We just need to speak and interact with them more closely to perceive this reality.

Yet when all is said and done Kalyegira will still insist that, “What a newspaper like the Kampala Express badly and urgently needs and is looking for right now is not people expert at streaming video and music or downloading software, but who can write with the basic clarity of a primary school child of the 1960s and 1970s — sentences that start with capital letters and end in full stops…”

I am surprised you, a media entity (a new one in the game at that) is not interested in a person who can stream a video and would rather have a clerk who can type correct grammatical sentences into a computer. But let me ask? Who provides better value in the digital age, a person who will live stream the video of the president swearing in come 2016 for me to watch while I pursue other business in London and also keep me abreast through a few tweets here and there (which according to me should not necessarily be written in correct grammatical sentences) or the other one who writes in well-constructed sentences about the swearing in and whose story will be published in the national daily the day after I have watched the event? To be honest, I would derive better value from the former as opposed to the latter.

Finally, concerning the too much watching of watching television, again we should not complain. What else best defines the success of a “clerk” than possessing a 21- Inch Plasma screen Television which the son or daughter can watch as and when they will? Why should my son watch National Geographic when the bounds of his success will be determined by how good they are at translating documents? Do they teach English Grammar on National Geographic? Tell me Kampala Express, please tell me why.

Therefore, to help you and your owner Kalyegira appreciate better how the young people think about old people, and what they think of our education system, I am recommending that you watch the video of a poem (above) performed by those three ladies from Nabisunsa Girls School and written by Suli Breaks.  Enjoy. Note, that to record that video, the person did not need to be an expert at English Writing but I am sure you will derive some value from watching it.