Am a locally highly trained graduate welder amongst many others, trained by American experts in arc welding, brazing, Oxy acetylene, tig, mig by welders who have worked in U.S. Navy, oil rigs, taught in American community colleges and professors engineers, with tenure in leading U.S. campuses, the technology sectors including jobs in Kenya are controlled by very fake engineers, can never bother, only performance will separate the chaff and the wheat eventually, engineers from Kenyan public unis starting with "the" are rewards for a good secondary school grade in KCSE its that simple, signing tenders only ndio kazi wanajua, they graduate without knowing what a ratchet is from personal experience, ukimuuliza hii ni nini? anazubaa na kutoroka akikutusi ati wewe na hio ni mambo "technical" don't you see the mess in kplc, buildings collapsing, poor planning, Chinese diploma engineers doing everything for us etc, take anything from Kenyan engineers commenting on technology as cartel controlled non sense.

I am not surprised. Welding is one of the most sort after skills in the industrialized world. Look at the skilled Occupation list of both Australia and Canada. Welding is always one of the professions they always have a shortage of and need to import from immigrants. Another highly sort after profession is Carpentry. So if you are looking for good welders and carpenters around, wale wamechanuka walienda kitambo.

This is the true picture. We killed tertiary colleges & converted them to universities. Case in point is Kenya Poly. In my village is Moi Institute of Technology - Kitere, which is now Rongo University. We reap what we sow!!!

Historically, there has been a trend that appears to have worked against 'blue collar' jobs for most Kenyans of African descent.

We are a white collar people.

For example, even here in wazua, @Impunity being a welder is taken as a serious tease... We prefer the 'engineer'.

Perhaps if we wish to get to blue collar in our times we may need to look seriously into robotics. Maybe there we can get competitive bids and build a cadre of welders etc.

Unfortunately this is very true. The settler wazungus who settled in Kenya came from the upper classes in England and they taught us tabia za high class without the resources to support the same tabias. Poor Kenyans got aspirations to live in large houses, do no manual labour and be attended to by servants. How many Kenyans today even lowly middle class have a house with a "servants quarters"? Even a guy in shags with 1 acre has a separate shack that is "nyumba ya mtu wa kazi". Kazi(manual labour) is something dirty that is beneath anybody with a proper education. All fundis are despised because most fundis are the ones who did not make it to study at Colleges and Universities. This is very unfortunate because it shows in the quality of workmanship everywhere from buildings to furniture.