In the wee hours of the morning, I hear a shriek from the corridor where my room is situated. So I uncomfortably turn on my bed, wondered then continued struggling with sleep. “Why can’t they just drink and finish their mess at Frakaz!” I say to myself. But how safe am I? Does sleeping on my bed makes me more mean than the philanthropists who go giving and being given everywhere within campus? How free is my mind as I turn on my bed, because one thing I am sure about is that at the break of dawn, I will see it again! So, do I hate myself, blame myself or run from myself?
Just the other day I took my friend to the dispensary late in the night, I witnessed a sight that worsened my sick friends condition and as the wise Solomon would say, I saw another evil under the sun.“Umekuja kuchukua tools!” remarks a security officer to a unanimous man, whom in the light I recognize as the mandazi cook at a chips café.
“Yes!” Replies the man emphatically. “Hapa lazima ujipange,” he proceeds, “kazi inaweza kulemea.”
I watch closely as he takes a good number of the ‘tools’ and stacks in his pocket, then a thought comes to my mind. “Tonight, a university student would allow their thighs to be ripped apart by someone who cant even give the definition of A for Apple; simply because he collected some few coins and gave them for maybe sukuma wiki and nyama quota!” Oh my God! What an absurd incidence.
But that isn’t my problem, neither is it with the tools nor the work persons. No, my problem is with the society. It has given us a wrong definition! The index of our definition or the benchmark of our reference is sex, so that the performance of anything is referenced at sex. What a menace? Lets us be candid with one another; it is me and you that make this society sedentary and therefore we define it. Therefore why does the action below the belt become a universal set and we become subsets?
My greatest worry is that no one seems to care that we have a generation to salvage, a generation threatened by inhalation from within. What remains of us? What happens when an institution of higher learning turns to be an institution of lower learning, or when common sense becomes NO-SENSE? Answer me, what happens? You mean we came here to be supplied by tools in every corner of the university! What happens when you put meat close to a dog and you don’t issue the command for the dog to eat? It will automatically eat and if the meat were poisonous, the dog will die. So is with the tools hanged everywhere, we can just eat despite the 10-10 rules, who cares! Between 10-10 is such a long time that you can eat to your fill! Come on eat!
While we lack seats to sit on during lectures, our spirits have been appeased because after all, the basic need has been given to us—the freedom to eat with a constant supply of tools. The stock will never run dry! What a fantastic investment!
Like Hama Tuma observes in his short story Who Cares For the New Millenium, no one seems to bother about the dawn of a new seed of generation which connotatively defines itself as one that eats and takes two for the road!
The choices we make today will define the life we live tomorrow, and ultimately our destination. With this trend of events, whom do you think will have the vitality and the vigor to safely anchor, for instance, the ship of Vision 2030 at the harbor of new thinking?
Lets us be like Abiyo in the short story The Refugee who disapproved Wani, Duku, and Picha, characters who thought that they would take advantage of her simply because she was a refugee. Come on, let this society not take advantage of us. Let it not think that we are so desperate for tools, there is more than tools for us.
Before you open your books to be written on by every pencil, remember an exam is soon coming, where you shall have sharpened your pencil till it will be no more and the books will be filled up, and there is no exchange!
As the mighty Achebe observes, ‘Flies are buried with corpses because they lack someone to advise them.’
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