Dramatic events like the transport sector strike of last week come and go.
I do not think there was ever any real doubt that, at some point, the government would cave in and grant the transport sector stakeholders some kind of concession in the form of lower prices for fuel.
But there are many other – and very important – challenges that any government is sure to face, which cannot be resolved by simply bringing key stakeholders together around a table to discuss possible solutions.
One such challenge is that of job creation.
There is a virtuous cycle that develops when jobs are plentiful. All employed persons pay taxes, both directly (as in Pay as You Earn) and indirectly (as in Sales Tax on goods purchased). So, the more people within a country there are in gainful employment, the more taxes you collect. And the more taxes you collect, the more and better public services and modern infrastructure you can provide.
So, the creation of well-paying jobs is really a huge priority in just about any country. As an elected leader, you cannot claim to have succeeded during your time in office if jobs have not been created one way or another.
Then if you study the histories of the nations which have been able to move the bulk of their people out of poverty – usually by evolving from “developing countries” to “newly industrialised countries” – you find over and over again, these countries emphasised having “an educated workforce”.
Education, and especially tertiary education, seems to be at the centre of such forward movement by any nation. Indeed, it seems impossible to have a country prosper if it does not have such a focus on education.
And this is something which most Kenyans regard as gospel: that whatever it takes, the children must go to school and continue all the way to a university education if they are bright enough to qualify.
There is no sacrifice that families will consider to be too great if they have a chance to launch one of their children along this path.
This was most recently illustrated in the tragic example of what happened in Eldoret City, where families sold plots of land or livestock to get their children enrolled in universities in European countries.
And not just any European country, but those that are known to be willing to employ young people from any part of the world who have learned their host country’s language while studying for their undergraduate course and so have precisely the required skills – linguistic as well as professional – to make them a good fit in this European country.
You would think this was a fairly well-thought-out plan to provide young people with precisely the kind of education that guaranteed them a bright future.
But for many of them, their parents' sacrifices were in vain.
And as for those who enrolled in local universities, the best example is in the field of medicine, or – more broadly – public health.
Kenyans are severely underserved in this field.
And yet there are literally thousands of qualified nurses, doctors and midwives in Kenya, who only manage to get occasional part-time work, and are otherwise unemployed.
Our education system trains plenty of health workers. But our economy fails to absorb them.
And each of these unemployed young people represent much the same kind of sacrifice on the part of their families as those young people in Eldoret who were misled into believing that they had a glorious future ahead of them, as skilled workers in some foreign country that pays good salaries.
Such is the paradox then: on the one hand, a passionate belief in the benefits of higher education.
And on the other hand, tens of thousands of university graduates are unable to get any opportunity for employment.
You would think this would discourage the quest for higher education, but it does not seem to.
The question one would ask then is this: why do we continue to value tertiary education so much, when it is obvious that the link between a university degree and economic opportunity has long been broken?
