Today’s world functions through knowledge acquisition, enhancement and application. These facts are validated by the life-changing research, inventions, and innovations that are guided, supported, enhanced and actualized through the application of knowledge.
Let it not be lost that even the over-hyped wisdom is nothing other than the application of instinct, knowledge and situational understanding to make sound and progressive decisions; and the wisdom does not exist and function in a puddle of ignorance. Without comprehensive knowledge on a subject matter, a wise decision will never be made because without knowledge, we remain at the mercy of guesswork.
The 21st Century world is rigged with extreme sophistication to a level where an ordinary mind without sufficient academic and intellectual capacitation can never crack it beyond their local and individual latitudes. This capacitation and knowledge best serve their global purpose when they are acquired through a standardized, well-regulated and organized system for effort and value based meritocracy.
More often than not, an intellectual’s mind is habituated with the flexibility to handle and provide meaningful counters and challenges to complex brain tormenting conversations in divergently opinionated environments and sometimes undertake real time experiential analysis and decision making not just based on current facts at hand, but also with the third eye on both the historical considerations as well as potential future ramifications.
The opposite is a case where you get slapped by someone for expressing your divergent opinion because the person lacks the intellectual capacity to understand what you are saying and conceptualize it from the both shoe perspective, as a result, they feel disrespected or mentally tortured to a level where they resort to physical confrontation as the only way of expressing their disapproval of your opinion.
Academic and intellectual capacitation is not just about acquiring a certificate as proof of compliance. It’s about the experiential exposure, the universal assimilation with 21st century systems, the comprehensive ability to see things from a global perspective. This is so that as a leader, you benchmark internationally with a global knowledge and understanding of things and processes.
Leadership and governance is not guesswork, where you read and understand things the way you want and based on your personal ability; or write your own things based on your capacity to capture, process and generate ideas within your own opinion limits. They are about operating within standardized procedures that are used as governing principles for the entire citizenry, with an informed, empowered and civilized mind that is open for and to improvement based on the global dynamics.
There is a lot of history in governance, policy and legislative processes that is very important in the execution the roles of any elected leader that require very extensive analytical reading and thinking that can be a serious challenge to an academically limited person whose brains and life are accustomed to the bare minimums of literacy.
People are only born with instinct, not leadership, skills, functional intelligence, operational ability, nor the corporate civility to handle governance issues with the competence, judicialism and wisdom as required by law and common sense. All these fundamental abilities and functional enhancers are learned in academic institutions and other centers of human capacity building and development that are always linked to academia.
If you don’t understand how the world operates due to lack of knowledge on how the world operates, and can’t communicate those issues from an informed perspective, it’s very likely you won’t be able formulate globally connecting policies, or legislate and oversight effectively and effectually.
As the political class attempts to disregard and dishonor education, even after allocating billions of shillings to the sector every year, let it not be lost to all of us that the people rubbishing academia and corporate professionalism under the guise of too much English, usually take their kids to the best and most expensive schools in Kenya and abroad.
Summarily, while we all agree that education and degrees are not the only measures of leadership, we can’t throw away the undeniable fact that meaningful university life has the unquestionable ability to civilize students in a global way.
It enhances their intellectual and interactive ability and raises their levels of reason and interaction beyond their tribal, village and cultural limitations and stereotyping.
It also promotes their ability to undertake the key purpose of leadership, which is to create new value within the existing societal systems, and add value to the existing societal elements; not just to occupy political office as has been customized in Kenya.
