By Rédaction Africa Links 24 with Daily Nation
Published on 2024-01-23 06:04:27
About a year ago, a man drove into his place of work at Kingsway Tyres, Meru branch, and needed his car fixed. The manager asked Fabian Kiria Kaburu to drive the Toyota Lexus to the wheel alignment bay. Seeing that a guard was about to get behind the wheel of his “machine”, the man protested. “He asked, ‘why do you want my car driven by a guard? Don’t you have experienced mechanics around?’ forcing me to hand the car keys back to the manager,” Mr Kaburu says in an interview. The man was shocked to later see Mr Kaburu punch some keys on the computerized wheel balancing machine. Minutes later, a son to a colleague walked in and sought his help in solving a maths problem. “I quickly showed him how to work out the maths problem. The man froze. Later, he apologized for being insensitive,” Mr Kaburu says, adding that in the line of duty, many people have looked down on him. “But I understand. Nobody would believe that a guard is learned.”
In 2002, he made the difficult decision to drop out of school in Form Two. His decision was driven by a strong desire to help his parents pay school fees for his older siblings. With his mother’s passion for educating her seven children, Mr Kaburu decided to sacrifice his education to ease the family’s financial burden. It was then that he embarked on a journey to Nairobi with a friend. “I was the best student in our class. But I could only study for two weeks and then I would be sent back home for school fees. I was able to get a job on people’s farms, and by the time I got back to class, they were almost done with the syllabus. I could just see my mother’s determination and one night I just decided to ‘help’ her by dropping out of school,” he says. In the city, he found employment as a “shamba boy” in Kabete, earning Sh1,000 a month and saving diligently to support himself in Nairobi and his family back home. After years of working in the farms, Mr Kaburu faced challenges in securing a better job due to a lack of academic qualifications.
In 2009, the idea of returning to school crossed his mind. Despite the hurdles, he approached the headmaster of an adult school in Meru and shared his dream of continuing his education. The 41-year-old was granted the opportunity and attended classes from 8am to 12pm, later extended to 4pm. Fast forward to 2016, he sat the Kenya Secondary Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE) exams and scored a B minus with 59 points. But the road to university was challenging as he juggled night shifts as a security guard, daytime classes, and parental responsibilities. Mr Kaburu chose to attend Meru University of Science and Technology, where he studied Bachelor of Education. Balancing his security job and university studies, he graduated in May 2022 with a Second Class Honours.
Currently, Mr Kaburu teaches Chemistry and Biology at St Pius Seminary in Meru County. To juggle both roles, he negotiates with the school’s timetable for morning classes so that he can have a short break before his security shift in the afternoon. Despite societal prejudices against security guards, Mr Kaburu has transformed his life through education and also posts inspiring videos on the social media platform Tiktok. He travels from school to school, motivating students and challenging stereotypes about their potential. So why has Kaburu refused to leave one of the jobs? “Since I did not have enough money to pay all my varsity fees at once, when I completed, my arrears and other bills had accumulated to about Sh500,000 so I decided to keep both jobs,” he says, adding that he has, however, paid the debts and currently has a balance of about Sh150,000.
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