With all the negative publicity and for reasons that the institution was still soaring, the haters and hate-lovers started conspiracies to discredit the institution. While the haters wanted merely to bring down the institution, the hate-lovers muted schemes to steal the idea of DALC and ride on the haters to bring it down once they got the idea.

To begin with, haters created blogs and hired bloggers to bad-mouth the institution away from inciting the media and on-going students through emails and text messages. Anyone who studied in DALC will tell you that they used to get anonymous and very negative text and email messages. Fortunately, many students understood that we were under attack and stayed put. Prof. Oborah says he was encouraged by those senior government officials who told him that he had to be firm because they had checked with authorities and everything was okay. They said this during meetings and many students understood much as some left.

But the most disturbing one was the hate-lovers who were keen to run away with the DALC idea. They would send many people to apply for jobs and sponsor students to find out more about DALC. One person later on would confess to doing the same directly to Prof Oborah recently.

The other avenues involved keenly following what Prof. Oborah was saying during the popular DALC programme (The Class) , on KTN TV, and later on invite him to be a keynote speaker or an important committee member in various forums and government constituted commissions.

The most notable was the late Prof. Douglas Odhiambo led Commission on Review and Alignment of Kenyan curriculum with 2010 Kenyan Constitution. The then Secretary General of Kenyan National Parents Association Mr. Musau Ndunda had invited Prof. Oborah to make a keynote speech, at one of the sittings at Kenya Institute of Education ( KIE) , now Kennya Institute of Curriculum Development (IKICD). Prof. Oborah speech became a major direction setter with several commissioners visiting Prof. Oborah privately ( including the chair Prof. Douglas Odhiambo). Although a number of them wanted help for their own children or family members, there was a group that wanted the idea to be posted as their own.

It was very boring for DALC staff to host senior government officials, in their offices, trying to learn about Talent Assessment and Talent Based Learning. They would sit in board rooms waiting to be lectured by Prof. Oborah or demand using computers hosting the servers.

At one moment Prof Oborah told them that it was impossible for them to learn all that took him PhD in mere briefings. It is at this time that they said that Prof. Oborah had a good idea that would not see the light of the day unless they fully understood it.

This brought in a new brand of hatred as Oborah stood his ground of not letting go his ideas through coercion. But he was surprised to see his own ideas taken up when much later the Kenya Ministry of Education, then led by Dr. Fred Matiangi, brought up the idea of Competence Based Curriculum and when TVET and related where initiated. Most of the pieces were borrowed from his presentations and documents with modifications in words and structure and with only one relief: They did not know the heart of it all. They actually camouflaged most it with different wordings e.g. instead of Talent Based Learning, they called it Competence Based Learning not knowing that competence is a mere symptom of talent. Of course, there were quotes of bench marking from other countries, but the overall basis was the same.

So came stakeholders’ presentations and where they would be stuck, they would use guys deemed to be friendly to Prof. Oborah to ask for more.