KPS children were purpose-driven children. With their pristine uniforms, weighty backpacks brimming with serious books, neat handwritings powered by fountain pens, and mountainous piles of homework, KPS was the undisputed standard. Even better, the president’s children studied at KPS.
Understandably, this quality education came at a pricey price. Children whose parents could not meet the pricey sums of KPS looked on enviously until the laborious tales of KPS homework packs soothed them into happily embracing their lane of pedestrian schools.
Decades later, through the seasons of changing management and location, KPS remains a viable option for those seeking quality education a few steep bars below private international schools.
Last week, an anonymous WhatsApp complaint by a section of KPS parents went viral, attracting all manner of curses and bile plus copious amounts of Ugandan humor. The gist of the KPS complaint reminded me of toilet wall graffiti I chanced upon while visiting my nephew at his secondary school.
“Stop competing with planned kids. Look in the mirror – that’s your competition!” chastised the writing on the toilet wall. Ugandan humor is a gift that keeps on giving. Lately, Ugandan conversation is littered with ‘planned kids’ versus ‘unplanned kids’- a comical take on the ‘haves’ versus the ‘have-nots.’
The KPS complaint would have been quite comfortable on that toilet wall. Speaking on behalf of aggrieved KPS parents, the complainant expressed their dismay over the good deeds of KPS management. You see, KPS offered prestigious scholarships to less privileged children, children from the ghetto, children from the other side of the fence, where the thorny grass is not green, cannot be green, will not be green and refuses to be green for the dust there is an obstinate brownish red and coats every surface.
Now, the aggrieved parents are concerned that such children and their corrupting behaviour will infect their children, the ‘historicals’ who deserve the quality education KPS has to offer. Quality education, their moneyed parents are paying for.
Surely, your money should earn you a voice at the table where good deeds are decided. While they acknowledge that giving a hand to the less privileged is indeed a wondrous deed – one must not get so carried away that they now invite the children of the great unwashed into their spaces of privilege and quality.
Instead, take your risky good deed, give it a snazzy project name and situate the project in the slum. For the love of safeguarding privilege, please do not invite the slum dwellers to the table.
The aggrieved and moneyed parents are right to be concerned – the envy of these ghetto dwellers is a daily threat to the cushioned and gated lives of the moneyed class. Now their poor kids, their poor planned children have the misfortune of learning side by side with slummy Ugandans from the other side of the fence. Oh! The burden forced upon the unburdened shoulders of their children!
For what do these ghetto children know of premium DStv and Netflix? On Mondays as the KPS children compare notes on television shows they watched over the weekend, how will the ghetto wolf pups compare with their ‘katandika butandisi’ movie shacks? Oh, the pain of being privileged!
Privilege, like a high-rise wall, encircles you; you and your shiny things are secure. The wall is a boundary – separating the haves from the have-nots; ensuring the roaming eyes of the great unwashed will not gaze into the immaculate lives of those with huge sums.
With more than enough challenges on our national plate from dysfunctional governance, massive unemployment to poverty, a brave optimist would imagine that our challenges would drive us hard into each other’s arms. How we fail that brave person’s imagination.
What if the change we seek is asking too much of our selfish greed? What if the collective steady progress we desire requires us to shake/upset our very own tables?
Justice minister Norbert Mao has a few thoughts on this dilemma. Speaking during a national youth dialogue to mark International Youth day, Mao observed, “Many people say they want to change society, but they don’t want to change themselves. Find the status quo in your life to change before you think of changing society.”
Thus, our aggrieved KPS friends are not fine. Their privilege is ‘paining’ them. Check your privilege – it might be paining your neighbours.
smugmountain@gmail.com
The writer is a tayaad muzzukulu
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