Sad tale of top Kenyan brains earning a living by cheating

One of the saddest stories I have read this week was published by BBC News Africa on “The Kenyan ghost writers doing ‘lazy’ Western students’ work”.

The story details how a young Kenyan woman, “Gail,” is eking out a living from writing school assignments and term papers for lazy, rich college kids in the US, UK and other countries in what ‘Gail’ terms as a ‘symbiotic relationship’.

She gets at least $320 (Sh32,000) a month, enough to pay rent and buy food, and the lazy rich kids get their degrees and waltz into the Western job markets.

WESTERN MEDIA

It is not a new story, really. Western media is awash with stories on how Kenya has become the hotbed of essay writing factories in which jobless Kenyan students with a great command of English and slowly but steadily helping Western students earn their degrees, one essay at a time. Heck, we even made it to the Gray Lady, the mighty New York Times, with an in-depth story and a brilliant, cheeky headline to match, ‘Cheating Inc.”

Cheating in Western colleges is so rampant that Kenyan entrepreneurs have set up small companies and consortiums of writers who work day and night to ensure a college kid somewhere in Illinois graduates on time.

It has minted millionaires perched on penthouse offices along Kenyatta Avenue who not only offer essay-writing services to Western kids, but also ‘academic consultancy’ services to local master’s and PhD students who are too lazy to write their own research papers.

Of course, there are those lone writers like ‘Gail’ and the ‘Mary Mbuguah’ who was interviewed by the New York Times who work from home, but still make a decent sum all the same.

ACADEMIC FRAUD

While this story is essentially about academic fraud – and how it eventually plays into professional integrity — the real story here, the one we are all ignoring, is the many Kenyan youth who have become so desperate in life as to resort to such ways of earning a living.

I promise you these young Kenyans do not like one bit what they are doing. Nobody slaves through nearly five years of engineering school only to spend their youthful working years writing term papers on euthanasia.

They are doing this because there is nothing else to do. And this should be the story we need to interrogate.

We need to know why young and educated Kenyans, brilliant to a fault, are taking up menial and demeaning jobs like doing assignments for Western college kids and getting blamed for fueling cheating in Western colleges.

These are Kenyans with degrees in economics, engineering, literature and mathematics who are supposed to use their knowledge and competencies to help us navigate the fourth industrial revolution, yet their intellect is misused to help American kids get through college.

RACIAL CARD

I don’t want to play the racial card here and ask why it is that the Western media is not bothered with tracking down the students who are paying top dollar to have their assignments done for them.

Or why they choose to focus their resources to shame jobless Kenyans who are simply trying to stay out of the streets. So I will look the other way and shout about what a shame and embarrassment this is to the Kenyan government and all the authorities involved.

These are young Kenyans who were sold the Kenyan dream; go to school, take your studies seriously, earn that degree and we will give you a job.

Their only crime was to follow the straight and narrow path and the government of Kenya failed them. And now they are being shamed all over the world for just trying to put food on the table.

HIGHLY EDUCATED

In a country where 78 per cent of the population is aged below 35 years - with a median age of about 19 years — we need to start asking the Kenyan government some hard questions; like why do we have highly educated young people like ‘Gail’ resorting to writing first-year assignments for $25 (Sh2,500) apiece.

These are young people who have been cheated out of a system that rewards mediocrity in a country where an engineering graduate laments that ‘the market is only available for two graduates’ while the other graduates have to look elsewhere.

I am somehow okay with a Western media publishing one-sided, hypocritical stories aimed at shaming jobless Kenyan youth. What I won’t put up with, and what we should never accept is a government that eats its young.

Ms Chege is the director of the Innovation Centre at Aga Khan University Graduate School of Media and Communications; [email protected]