A few years ago I went to my local Nakumatt to do some shopping. Being a Sunday afternoon, I thought that I would pretty much have the whole supermarket to myself. Shock on me, the place was packed tighter than a busaa joint on a Saturday night!!
Then it hit me that this was the weekend before the official opening of schools for the 3rd and final term of the year and that Kenyans in their usual herd instinct mentality had chosen to make a beeline to the supermarket for some last minute “back to school” shopping. I suppose that the same was happening at myriad supermarkets, bookshops and school uniform shops across the country on that Sunday afternoon. The lines were impossibly long and jammed with mums, dads, their children and shopping carts piled high with all manner of goods, many obviously school related shopping.
Smug in the knowledge that I had already done the “back to school” (or in my case “1st time school shopping” since my youngest daughter had taken the decision that she wanted to go to a boarding school to finish up the 3 years and 3 months of her formal high school) a few days earlier, I could only look on amazed at the lengths Kenyan go to punish themselves waiting until the last minute to do what had been pre-ordained 4 weeks earlier when the schools closed at end of the 2nd Term. It took at least 45 minutes for me to get to the check out counter something that had taken me 10 minutes a few days earlier.
This unique “Kenyaness” seems to afflict all of us with the same force and alacrity. Maybe it is the air that we breathe or the infectiousness of our seemingly poor sense of planning towards things that we can already see will be required at a certain time. It extends to our leisure time when we decide to go on holiday in December but wait until the last minute in November to start enquiries on what options are available only to find that all the choice locations were booked months ago then we start blaming the travel agency!
It has also permeated our payment of bills waiting until the absolute last minute then heading to meandering queues at the service outlet to make our payments. This apathy has also permeated our ability to judgmentally make a trip for a planned meeting bearing in mind the horrible traffic snarl ups we encounter, making us all mad and inconsiderate drivers as we rush to fill in every grid locked space on our roads thereby compounding an already difficult situation while we could have very well planned to leave an hour earlier and not at the last minute!!
We also all seem to have the collective apathy towards keeping ourselves fit and healthy, by avoiding anything involving physical exercise unless absolutely necessary and then finally collapsing in a heap of clogged arteries, diseased hearts and high cholesterol blood sugar levels forcing us to spend weeks and fortunes of cash getting treatment for something that we could have nipped in the bud at an early opportunity by a regular regimen of exercise. Again last minute issues become our undoing. Those lucky enough to work in a storied building would very well get the needed dose of exercise by using the stairs instead of the lifts and elevators for instance.
Calling a crisis meeting at the last minute when a catastrophe was looming on the horizon for the last several months is surely one of the things that we would very easily avoid with proper planning, delegation and control, but look at our government, huddled in crisis meeting after crisis meeting often back to back……no wonder we tend to collectively be the same!!
As part of the culture change of the country, perhaps we could start by eschewing everything last minute and embrace instead a culture of just in time since just in time involves doing what needs to be done at the time that it will cause minimum grief and inconvenience to yourself and others as opposed to last minute which causes maximum grief and inconvenience to yourself and others.
Kenyans leading from the front to rid Africa of the culture of perpetual lateness well known by the rest of the world should be our ‘raison de etre’ though I am not betting any money that this will start anytime soon.
Anyone game for this?
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