FOREIGN DEGREES VRS ‘LOCAL INTELLIGENCE’: THE DILEMMA OF THE STUDENT BURGER. PART II

If an IT lecturer who has no email address takes you through a diploma course in IT Management, you would surely graduate with the diploma, but you would never be able to work with Excel. You would later have to learn all the Microsoft packages on your own, to be worthy of the certificate.

Whereas the desire to acquire a foreign qualification may be well intentioned, the decision to travel abroad is mostly an ‘escape from Sorbibor,’ than a well thought through educational pursuit. It becomes strategic and in fact, necessary for most foreign students to intentionally false start their education, by enrolling at a college to study IT. It is a willful misadventure that will see them sit under the tutelage of an Indian or Sri Lankan tutor, who is himself teaching the IT subject for reasons that are not any different from the students.’ For obvious reasons, they all have to appear to be doing something ‘renewable’. In the end, a fine certificate is necessarily awarded, because both student and tutor understand the nature of the adventure. They maintain a good relationship, because it may be necessary to do a PhD later, with or without a proposal.
A certificate obtained in such circumstances is like the autistic child of a teenage mother; the child is a nuisance but she has to pretend to be happy about it, in the sustained belief that it may grow to mix well with those produced from Holy Spirit-inspired Christian homes. A certificate also has a Machiavelli nature; a good job justifies the means.
This is normally the preface to the many phases of the life of the student burger. When they finally start their programme of choice, their confused existence in a welfare country mirrors the spaghetti nature of the literature review that they would later squeeze into the chapter two of their dissertation. Usually, the programme of choice is an afterthought; the original one had to be changed or deferred, to provide the breather. The change may have been inspired by the discovery of more ambitious sounding courses or the all important financial consideration. Either way, the primary objective for cutting short a promising career or leaving the comfortable life for a cold destination was to acquire a foreign qualification. Folks back home will be impressed with a degree from a foreign college that is only better than Kimbu Sech-Tech in Accra, because the school fees are charged in pounds sterling. And frankly, other times, we do a degree or a professional course because our less ambitious friends have managed to do it. We didn’t want to.
Last year, I met a young Ghanaian boy on a London underground train. I was happy to have learnt that he was a fellow Vandal. As we chatted about how our traditional profane songs have found youthful modern renditions in Raga and Rap, our conversation zeroed in on the purposes of our lives in London. The lad, who persistently called me senior, told me he had come to study an MBA in football administration. His dream was to go back and manage the GFA and later the Confederation of African Football (CAF). He could go on a sabbatical to FIFA, to work with monsieur Sepp Blatter. What do you think of this guy? Wouldn’t a general MBA be better? And why must it be always be MBA? I didn’t have the ‘professional right’ to advise him against his decision to better African football, because I have failed to get a decent job with the qualifications I have piled up here. I kept rethinking my career options and came back to the same rhetorical question that most student burgers ask themselves: should I go or stay to challenge the system? I wished the young boy well, after managing to tell him to keep his eyes open.
If you have the audacity to advise somebody to open their eyes, when yours are still closed, you will never see the plentiful opportunities around you. When you look closely, you would realize that no matter the course you studied, you can penetrate the corporate employment sectors in a foreign land, just like the aborigines. Of course, there will always be the usual racism and discrimination, and certain top positions are strategically reserved for the owners of the land. There are also inbuilt checks and balances in the system that makes it nearly impossible for the student burger to transcend certain boundaries. But a few people you know have managed to find the key to open big corporate doors, but you are still doing a key job (a cleaning job that allows the cleaner to keep the keys to an office, so that she can do the cleaning in her own time).
When I was doing a corporate observation job (see part I) at an Engineering firm in West London, shortly after completing my third degree, a 22 year old Nigerian lady gave me a rude awakening that at once exposed the lethargic buffoon in me. She always met me at the reception reading or typing some of the articles I used to supply a newspaper back in Ghana. She one day requested to see what I had been neglecting my duties to type. I printed her two articles for her troubles. An hour later, she came to me and addressed me in a language that I thought was too intemperate for a Monday afternoon. She told me bluntly that I had no excuse sitting on my bum observing beautiful women come and go, when I could write for a newspaper as good as the Guardian. She fumed that she hates black people who hide behind racism and discrimination to justify their disgusting indolence. I tried to pull a defense, but she was overpowering. She asked: ‘How many newspapers have you applied to?’ I answered ‘two’. Then came the stinker: ‘Ben, you are a lazy bastard, there are nearly a thousand newspapers and magazines in Britain, if two of them reject you, is that enough reason to burry your hands in your thighs?
The awful truth is that many student burgers are lazy. The address bar to your internet search engine recognizes pornographic web addresses than job sites. You are allergic to newspapers, except the free ones you find on trains and buses. The UN offers lots of internships and high flying jobs for any body who would bother to apply. But you have never checked their website; instead you spend time on wedding planning sites, dreaming of a prince charming. There is no point checking the UN jobs site now, because Kofi Annan is no more the Secretary-General. He waited for you for 10 years, but you didn’t apply. Now, the UN is headed by Ban Ki Moon, a South Korean. He wouldn’t recognize you. Instead, you can try the ECOWAS, where Ibn Chambas is still the Secretary.
Life in a foreign world is understandably unpredictable. In many ways, your breakthroughs depend on the foresight of the person who would host you. If he is a shortsighted fellow who sees a full-time job at TESCO the breakthrough of his life, he would not encourage you to go for a mortgage. The day you made the mistake of telling him how much you have saved for your school fees, he started a senseless war that sent you packing. He messed up your beginning, but that is some five years ago. You have been on your own since then, what have you been able to do? A Chinese girl, who only started learning English in 2003 when she immigrated to Britain, has managed to write a novel in English, which has won her an Orange Prize for literature. It comes with £30,000. English has been your official language since you were a fetus, but you find it difficult replying your official correspondences. Instead, you have a presence in all the internet chat rooms, writing sexually malevolent staccato sentences to your lovers.
Through my writings, I sometimes get to meet some incredible people. Recently, a very wonderful Ghanaian lady invited me to a traditional dinner in Banbury, an old town in Oxfordshire, UK. She said she had been reading my articles and had fallen in love with my writing style. She asked me if I was trying to copy George Sydney Abugri of the Daily Graphic. I said to her that George is the father of the creative feature genre, the same way that Abraham was the father of nations. I was flattered, nevertheless.
When a woman who owns a car washing bay in the UK invites you to a traditional dinner, you can expect the unusual. She served me good old bankye ampesi and kontomire sauce condensed in a sea of koobi perfumed zomi, and religiously decorated with carefully sliced eggs, as if she knew I wore a moustache. As we got talking, she told me she is also part owner of a leafleting company in London. She has a mortgage in a good location in Banbury and is trying to set up a business in Ghana. I asked her how she has been able to achieve all that in seven years, and she was as inspiring as the poems of William Wordsworth. As a principle, she has refused to apply for a British passport, because ‘the Ghanaian passport is not as limiting as people think.’ ‘There are always barricades, but you have to learn to jump over them, and sometimes they are imaginary’.
What followed was a didactic-laden retelling of the story of Joseph in the Bible. ‘This man was removed from the pit to Egypt, then imprisoned and demeaned, but eventually he became governor and rationed food in a foreign land’ she said. As I fell for her eloquence, I reminded myself how lazy I have been. Many of us have never been questioned by the police, even though we have been driving without insurance for so long. There are employment agencies all around us, yet we find the western world limiting for our dreams. She was bold enough to tell that she was single and went on to decidedly sidestep the bounds of womanly modesty, by asking me to introduce her to any of my friends. She is 35 years, and has never had a boyfriend in her life. Great girl!
She was the direct antithesis to the other lady I met at Middlesex university years ago. She was the typical African female specimen who sees a simple dinner treat as an opportunity to sample all the delicacies she has seen on TV. This lady ate three courses of a buffet lunch at a Chinese restaurant, to the discomfiture of the restaurant attendant. When she got up for the fourth round, I could only imagine she was wearing an adult pampers, because she seemed to have miraculously passed away the digested stuff, to create more room for the final onslaught. She is a control freak who has decided to tie her opportunism to the apron strings of the unfortunate man she would marry. Meanwhile, all she is doing to prepare for her Mr. Right is to daily trim her bum and file her nipples, as if orgasm was more important than the second coming of Jesus Christ. Those girls usually fail in everything, especially in their marriage, and their children never do well in school.
As unpredictable as the life of the student burger is, there are certain things you should know. Education is not always about doing a Masters degree or the notorious ACCA. If you had done a week’s course in Housing management or Benefits administration, you would have easily found a job with one of your local councils. Now you have three degrees, with little experience, what really can you do for anybody?
Time is catching up on you, and it is getting really frustrating. It is shameful that you are still in that job you swore to ditch five years ago. When you first started it, you branded your older colleagues failures for doing a terrible job for six years. Now you are about outdoing them, and there seems to be no way out. And frankly, you have lost the energy to pursue anything ambitious. If you had the option to work for free at a posh office, you would be happy. But now, the sky has fallen on you; at best you can only be a tragic hero.
There is always something good to salvage from a bad situation. If you look at things carefully, you haven’t lost much. As you read the dying pages of this article, you are instantly remembered of the massive plot of land you have procured at Mempeasem, near East Legon, where Abedi Pele and Daddy Lumba have their mansions. The likes of you has been able to afford an expensive wedding to a beautiful lady, who would have treated your marriage proposal with contempt if you were still in Ghana. Your folks back home, who have no idea how demeaning your job is, are happy that you are one of the privileged ones living abroad. And I nearly forgot, you recently sent home a good car, which is resting in your father’s garage, waiting for the eventual return of the student burger. Your degrees are also looking new, though it’s been a while since you graduated.
So what else? Well, if you ever read Ayi Kwei Armah’s Fragments, you would realize that the opening pages of the story talk of somebody who traveled long ago, but will return. Whatever goes up, will surely come down. You can’t keep renewing your stay in a foreign land, when a permanent life is guaranteed back home. You don’t have a choice, but to do as K.K Kabobo says: running away when nobody is pursing you.
If you are as free as me, there could be several other choices open to you. Recently, a publisher sent me a mail from Nigeria that he would like me to write a column for his magazine. That is the advantage of being a freelance journalist; you are free to go anywhere, like a medieval troubadour. So if you don’t hear from me again, I could well be in Nigeria. Oh Prof. Kofi Awoonor, how did you find such a fitting title for your novel: This Earth, my Brother!