Growing up in Lyantonde, I worshipped a man. Not in the church sense, but in the way only a barefoot boy can worship a grown man who owns a car. His name was Lubowa.
Lubowa was among the first people in our area to own a Peugeot, which back then was the equivalent of owning a private jet. He was an engineer, a real one, and he had built himself a house so handsome that we children slowed down when passing it, as if the walls might share their secrets if we lingered. Every morning we walked seven kilometres to school, dust between our toes, and every morning the dream was the same: one day, I will be like Lubowa.
I should be honest about something. We admired the car and the house. We were children, and we were looking at wealth. The difference between Lubowa and the people children admire today is not that he had things and they have things. It is that we could see how he got his. Everyone in Lyantonde knew the story: the years of study, the jobs, the buildings he put up for other people before he built his own. The Peugeot was the last chapter of a story we had watched from the beginning. That made him more useful than a celebrity. He was a map, and a boy could follow a map.
Today, ask a Senior Four student who they want to be like, and listen carefully. I won’t pretend to have surveyed the nation, but I have listened, and you can test this yourself at the next family gathering or school gate. Sooner or later, a socialite’s name comes up, and it comes up without embarrassment.
Let me be fair to them. Being a socialite is work. Building an audience takes discipline, and negotiating a brand deal takes skill. I do not doubt that many of them are shrewd and tireless. But look at what the child sees: the car, the outfit, the entrance. The path is invisible, or there isn’t much of one. A teenager can see exactly what a socialite owns and has no idea how to get it. Lubowa’s wealth came with directions. Theirs comes with a caption.
So, the question isn’t why children admire the wrong people. It is why we have made the right people so hard to see. Mostly, we did it to ourselves.
We let the institutions that produced Lubowas decay. The teacher, once the most respected person in the village, now earns a salary that barely covers her transport to school. The nurse works double shifts in a hospital that has run out of everything except patients. When the people who deserve admiration are visibly struggling, admiration behaves like water: it flows to wherever the ground is lowest.
Then we handed the microphone to the wrong people. Watch the evening news and count the minutes: the party gets its camera crew, and the scientist gets a sentence between the weather and the football. Advertisers chase “engagement” the way the Israelites chased the golden calf, throwing deals at anyone with followers and never asking how many were bought in bulk.
And somewhere along the way, the family fireside went quiet. The uncle who once told you how he built a business from nothing is now in another city, or another country. Children learn whom to admire from a screen instead, and the screen, unlike the uncle, has no interest in their wellbeing. It only wants their attention.
The tragedy is that the Lubowas have not disappeared. They are simply invisible. Somewhere in this country a nurse is walking ten kilometres to deliver a baby, and a headteacher is producing first grades in a classroom with no windows. Somewhere a young man is tinkering with irrigation pipes that could change his village. You will never see them trend. Their work is real, their paths are knowable, and almost nobody under twenty has heard of them. Hard work, it turns out, has terrible marketing.
That suggests the fix is not another lecture about values. It is marketing, of the honest kind.
Here is one concrete idea. Every secondary school should host a monthly session with a local achiever, with one rule: no motivational speeches. Instead, the guest must answer four questions. What did you do at sixteen? What went wrong? What did your first job pay? Who helped you?
Children are not short of inspiration. They are short of steps. A socialite’s life looks easy because no one has shown them the cost. An engineer’s life looks possible only if someone shows them the first rung. Do this once a month for a year and a school will have twelve maps on its wall. Local radio stations can record the sessions and air them, a fitting way to prove they care about the next generation.
The rest, such as paying teachers and nurses like the pillars they are, and giving substance as much airtime as spectacle, remains true and remains overdue. But those are battles for years. The map-making can start next term.
I still pass through Lyantonde from time to time. The road is better now, the children mostly wear shoes, and many carry phones. I wonder who they dream of becoming as they walk to school.
Written by Nathan Were
Nathan Were works to advance farming systems in Africa and is based in South Africa. Email: [email protected]
