Of all the benefits that President William Ruto brought back with him from his recent trip to the US, perhaps none of these benefits – which Kenyans generically term “goodies” – will mean as much to individual Kenyans as that there are apparently many scholarship opportunities to be had.
For if there is one thing that defines the average young Kenyan's dreams and aspirations, it is the yearning for the opportunity for advanced learning at some overseas university.
Indeed, it is this unquenchable thirst for tertiary education that makes Kenyan students and their parents easy prey for con artists posing as “agents” offering an easy path to such overseas study.
As someone with some knowledge of such matters, I would say that the only safe path for a young Kenyan is a scholarship given by the institution at which you wish to study; or by the government of the country in which that college is located.
In Kenya, we read almost every year of some bright boy from a desperately poor family, turning up at the gates of the school to which he has been admitted after a national exam, to beg for mercy and ask that he be allowed to enrol there, despite not having a single cent to his name.
And somehow, some deal is usually worked out to ensure that the bright young boy does not miss out on his opportunity for secondary education.
Anyone hoping for such mercy when admitted to an institute of higher learning in any rich country is seriously deluded.
Perhaps the only country I know of where you will find an even greater thirst for higher education is Nigeria. And an online article I recently came across was a tragic illustration of how badly things can go wrong when young Africans (in this case Nigerians) pursue this dream of further education, all the way to some European university.
Also illustrated by this story is that not every crushed dream of higher education has a conman or a devious politician lurking behind the scenes.
The university in this case was Teesside University, which I must admit I had never heard of before I read this article.
These students were to find themselves the tragic victims of external factors every bit as pitiless as any conman: exchange rate fluctuations.
I suspect some Kenyans studying abroad may have briefly felt the same chilly winds of exchange fluctuations blowing, earlier this year when the shilling fell from about Sh130 to the dollar to Sh160 to the dollar.
Under such circumstances, what had seemed an adequate amount at the time you set out for your studies abroad, suddenly is not quite enough.
But in Kenya that was a temporary drop, which soon gave way to a strengthening of the Kenyan shilling against the dollar.
With Nigeria what happened was on a totally different scale, and had devastating consequences:
As the BBC website explained, “Nigerian students have been thrown off university courses and ordered to leave the UK after a currency crisis left them struggling to pay tuition fees on time. Teesside University students were blocked from their studies and reported to the Home Office after the value of Nigeria's naira plummeted, wiping out their savings...permission to enter the UK had been cancelled because they stopped studying at the university...they do not have a "right of appeal or administrative review against the decision".
For the ambitious young Nigerian (or Kenyan for that matter) it cannot get worse than this.
So, do you think this excruciatingly painful and humiliating experience will extinguish the dreams of higher education for these or any other similar students from Africa?
I would argue that it won't. Cruel and undeserved setbacks of this kind are nothing new to the African continent and its inhabitants.
If it were possible to follow the trajectories of the lives of these young Nigerians who have been ejected from Teesside University, I believe you would find that a decade or so from now, they had somehow found some other path to the advanced degrees that they had suddenly found that they could not obtain at Teesside.
