Time is ripe to redefine excellence and success

Recent reports of suicides and violence against headteachers after the release of last year’s KCPE results brought back memories from my early days.

Then, we had two types of role models. One type included people who went to Makerere University like President Kibaki, the other type were those who excelled from the University of Hard Knocks.

The choice of role model was based on how well one was performing in school. One of the role models from the University of Hard Knocks had very little formal education but as a sign of his affluence he had a monkey as a pet.

The pet was a village hero and any time one performed poorly in school there was a consoling slogan that you don’t need so much education to buy your own monkey.

The analogy had one powerful message that poor performance in academics shouldn’t make you a loser in life.

Another role model is a man who is popularly known as Irrelevant. He says that he got the name from an incident in primary school.

After handing marked English composition papers to the pupils the teacher created two groups on the basis of 50 per cent as pass mark.

The man was left standing alone because his paper did not have any marks instead it had the word IRRELEVANT. From that day he quit school determined that he cannot be irrelevant in life. He ventured into business and excelled.

He always tells the story with pride and although he doesn’t have his own monkey, he drives what he calls “one wiper” in reference to his prized Mercedes Benz car as a testimony that he is not irrelevant in real life.

There are some people who have excelled in academics and life despite having performed poorly at some point in their life.

Ben Carson, the celebrated neurosurgeon was bottom of class in class five, his classmates called him dummy.

Thomas Edison who had very little formal education ended up becoming one of the shapers of modern life, he invented the light bulb among other inventions. People like Bill Gates and the late Steve Jobs were college drop-outs but as you know they never dropped out of life, they excelled instead.

One of my friends says that in life you need as much numeracy as you need literacy. Kenyans are highly numerate, unfortunately there are no clear statistics on the numeracy levels.

Maasai herdsmen knew how to count their cows long before Carey Francis brought mathematics to Kenya. My mother used to tell me that before Independence a Standard Four graduate who had sat the examination known as COMMON would get a good job at a bank during those days.

This demonstrates how little formal education you need to excel in life.