ATTACHMENT IMPOSSIBLE

 Part One

The moment I ‘landed’ in third year the first thing I knew was that am a senior student waiting for fourth years to finish their few months before I officially become an elder and a finalist. Little did I know that there was something known as industrial attachment which one had to look for as part of the course. The moment you receive your attachment logbook and letter reality dawns, the course you are taking has limited or wide range of opportunities. In this case there are two things involved if your course has a wider scope you are safe, if your course has limited scope, a course even your lecturer is not sure where you are going to be employed or attached then know that your three year study at the university is wasted or something close to that.

During our departmental briefing our head of department Dr, Professor, and Commonwealth Scholar clearly stated that he will not come to supervise any student who goes for attachment in remote areas such as Mfangano Island and those islands in lake Victoria where boats are the only means of transport thus ferrying his French made Peugeot to and from the island a near impossible task thus making his mobility a problem. Proff also assured us that together with other lecturers in our department they won’t be able to supervise students who ‘decide’ to go for attachment in areas, which have security problems such as banditry plus areas with no telecommunication network since he cannot afford to be off the grid with his i-phone 6. Attachment supervision was limited within the borders of the republic those of us who had secured attachment overseas, my friend Andy Muphasa and I in this case had attachments already waiting for us to avail ourselves physically in Southern Sudan. However, we had to forego them since the jurisprudence of our department ends at Lodenyang and Lokichogio in Turkana County.

Having been instructed in advance not to take up funny responsibilities such as being a flower girl, tea boy, office messenger, file placement and displacement officer, number plate registration officer and receptionist. Being choosy in selecting an organization for attachment became mandatory so as not to be given those funny responsibilities. Getting an attachment seemed to be a herculean task more so if you are doing these courses which just came up the other day, the ones’ the office messenger and the gateman at the Organisation where you drop your Request For Attachment (RFA) letter have no idea if it is a course or a name of a person in the organization.

The emergence of new courses some of which are units of a mainstream course make it very difficult for attaches to get a field attachment. Despite having the a RFA letter four months prior to the day the attachment was set to begin and having dropped them in all organizations manually, all organizations that their names crossed my mind no response yet making me wonder where ‘Proff’ wants me to get an attachment. Most organizations decided to be ‘petty’ asking for documents such as primary school leaving certificate, high school leaving certificate, birth certificate, chief’s letter and certificate of good conduct which is given by the men in blue after a minimum of two weeks and a maximum of infinity for it to be processed as if I was a criminal. The moment you provide them with the required certificates they shift the goal post again claiming they need your first, second and third year complete transcripts, which obviously you don’t have instead of telling you directly there are no vacancy for attaches’ they take you for a merry go round ride which never ends, you just give up voluntarily.

Colleagues who often said from day one in our first year of study that they know where they will be attached and employed with “this course of ours” which we were given either voluntarily by the rebranded joint admissions board (JAB) or involuntarily courtesy of cut off points or something close to that. Some even claimed that the easiest thing to get is attachment as long as you take your letter personally to the organisation, having taken many letters to organizations personally and even applying online , nothing seemed to be coming my way ,the more I applied the more frustrated I became.

To be continued………………………….