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AFTER TUITION WHAT NEXT? (Part 3)

Do we have enough space for children to play? Are we ready to let the children play? Can we sit down and enjoy the extra co-curricular activities of our kids?
On Sunday, I was travelling to Nairobi. Just at Nyayo stadium, there was this huge traffic jam, which of course is a nightmare to parents on such a day when they are taking their kids on a stroll. This jam has of course created employment to a number of hawkers who brandish their wares on motorists. From peanuts to car spare parts and of course the very noble kids wares. So this couple is held by jam, and a hawker brandishes just the right product! A ball, we have peculiar behaviour though, the balls we buy are never for the foot or leg, but for water polo, anyway, the child demands to own one and the mother buys.
Now the child has a football eer water polo ball, don’t ask me its name, all I know is the ball is meant to be kicked, the Kenya way. I remember when we were young; we kicked even the basketball, volleyball and the handball. Then we had the fields. Where we the child play the ball?
This child is from a middle income earning family. Maybe they were coming from a picnic at the Nairobi National Park. They live in a gated compound, or maybe flat that borders a marshland behind and a street in the front, the shoulders are bordering such buildings too in Eastlands. Maybe if they have grass, which I doubt because almost has a car, the landlord or the owners have put a sign, “DON’T STEP ON GRASS” So this child is reduced to playing on the streets, that is if maybe, they have the liberty to play.
One thing I am certain is that not every parent will let the children to play. The house helps will be quick to curtail all manner of game be it, NOT DIRTY. Young kids have therefore been reduced to sleeping zombies.
The ban on holiday tuition clearly shows the inability of the country to think out a policy. Nowadays we have numerous diseases which affect both the young and the old.  Diabetes spares no child. I am emphatically against holiday tuition but my concern is what next?
We need to come up with policies that offers solutions and not just stops what we feel is not good and inappropriate. The holiday tuition yes, has its flaws; it has made many of the brilliant minds become redundant. The tuition itself offers a buzzing zzzzzzz of hands off studies which is more or less spoon feeding the students/pupils with answer question phenomena. A child gets out of school with an electronic mind of answering questions yet there is nothing educational about the answering. The extra tuition rehearses and sings the song of how to pass and not the part of understanding. Yet we are quick to jump in jubilation when these automatic answering machines come out successfully. What I have learned in this field of teaching is that even secondary exams can be crammed and recited like the Apostles Creed.  
As we wipe out the extra coaching we should come up with the leisure part. Looking around Nairobi, our primal thought, there are a number of places the game part of play could be hosted. Don’t mention Uhuru park or Jamhuri park, they have paedophiliac kind of smell. Jee vanjee has weapons of mass destruction while Arboretum has been romanticized so much. That leaves us with the Village Market, Sarit Centre and Westgate. How then can you play in a mall?  Besides, these places have hefty fees of upto Kshs. 200 an hour!  In Kisumu, a disaster is brewing while Eldoret let us not talk about it. That leaves us with Kakamega which has the Bench has got a new meaning.
We therefore need to build facilities for recreation and guard them with our lives before we think of killing this bondage of holiday tuition!    

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