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CITY GIRL: Shame on all those taunting Joho for his D minus

April 1st, 2017 3 min read

This week, I watched as people with dubious qualifications made fun of Governor Ali Hassan Joho over his D minus.

Forget the controversy about his alleged fake papers, the uncertainty over whether he cleared high school in 1992 or 1993, and classmates with the memory of a goldfish who cannot ascertain if the guy actually attended school.

The main issue here is that there is absolutely nothing wrong with Joho and his D minus. In fact, let me take this early opportunity to congratulate Joho for his D minus.

Joho, you did better than many candidates of recent years, given that your parents were not rich enough to buy you exams so you could get a fake A grade like many living among us today.

You are a living testimony that it doesn’t matter where you come from, what matters is where you are headed. Do not let anyone give you any more grief over your D minus ever again.

ACHIEVE GREAT SUCCESS

I have lived long enough to know that your KCSE grade has nothing to do with how your life will turn out. I have lived long enough to see people who never went to school a day in their lives or dropped out at lower primary go on to achieve great success in life. Education is not always the key to success.

What matters in this life is not what grade you achieved in KCSE or how many degrees you have accumulated, but how smart and sometimes, how crafty, you are in maneuvering the trails of life.

And there is no better example for this argument than Joho the man, who, if we are being honest, is probably much more a successful businessman than a million of us put together.

The reason we are so bitter towards Joho’s D minus, the reason we are making fun of the guy is not so much about his grade, but because he reminds us of that poor little boy who would eat mangoes for lunch and tail the class… yet here he is, two decades later, giving the President and his men sleepless nights.

What has your A grade done for you lately? Has your C plus paid a few bills perhaps? Or maybe you traded in your B plus for a mortgage deposit?

You see, we are all a bunch of hypocrites. We cannot believe how a dunderhead like Joho can scale such great height of wealth, such that the government can freeze his accounts and he still wouldn’t feel the pinch, or stop talking.

What would happen if the government froze your account? Would you swipe your B plus at the supermarket?

MOST SUCCESSFUL

The most successful people in the world and even in the country will tell you how poorly they did in school. The wealthiest folks around, if we are being honest, were the ones who never got anything in class, they were the kids who seemed least likely to succeed. And don’t tell me that success is not measured by wealth. Wealth is success.

It is even sadder that there are people who are making fun of Joho from their rented one-bedroomed apartments in Embakasi, where you have to jump over puddles of dirty water to get from one miserable place to another. Many of his critics have nothing to show for their good grades.

The bottom line is, it doesn’t take an A or a D minus to own 30,000 acres of land, nor does it require you to score a C plus to own the biggest company in this side of the world.

Just walk around Nairobi and ask some of the richest women in this country what they scored in KCSE and you will be shocked that they have no idea what you are talking about. Meanwhile, leave Joho and his D minus to prosper. Please.