When you count the number of loudspeakers discharging content about the cracks inside the education sector in Kenya, ninety-nine per cent have tunes directed at the higher education funding model and the resultant crisis inside our institutions of higher learning.
I understand that our hands are currently full and multitasking might be a luxury we cannot afford to buy, but final year students writing their primary and secondary school exams are currently staring at a crisis and they’re kneeling for our support.
Beginning next week, we shall remain with exactly five weeks to the official kickoff of the Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE) – a series of exams so critical to the future prospects of the life of our young people that parents have always put their lives on the life to ensure their kids get the best treatment and sound mental health during the exam period.
You would have to look at the landscape with a magnifying glass to find a prominent industry leader who flunked in their year’s KCSE and rode the red carpet to prominence without having the benefit of a family name or generational wealth; and this excludes the irascible political class who have proven to break every rule in the book without consequence to the conventional order of things.
For children born in the lower percentile of the socioeconomic graph – and who make up the critical mass of the 2024 candidate pool – the KCSE exams not only provides a jailbreak from the dehumanising circle of poverty to the door of endless potential they glean at from outside their birthright, it also restores community pride and individual place on the table of national achievers. It goes without saying that the KCSE 2024 will be more than final exams – it will be life and death.
Yet the preparations preceding this annual judgment day have been lacking in vitality on the part of the ministry of Education. A careful review of media reports the past week have seen school heads take-up the role of the lone voice crying out in the wilderness. They’re warning parents of the over 965,501 children writing their KCSE exams this year, that secondary schools are yet to receive the promised support from government to make their final dreams come true.
Every year, the Ministry of Education allocates Sh22,244 allocated per secondary school student under the government Free Day Secondary School Education programme. Twenty-two thousand shillings is not even enough to afford a month’s supply of a bouquet of freshly-cut flowers that sit on the desk of your favourite government official. It’s now emerging that, three weeks to the close of the academic year, only a total of Sh15,192 per learner has been disbursed so far.
There are pillars of the economy a government can afford to play games with and have sufficient wiggle room to escape the consequences, and the education sector, unfortunately, is not one of them. Since we are a God-fearing nation who have substituted science with prayer since August 2022, the Holy Bible, in the Book of Proverbs 22:6, instructs us, and I quote: “Train up a child in the way he should go and when he is old he will not depart from it.”
These disturbing media reports of secondary school heads being served with orders by suppliers of goods and services for overdue payments accruing from undertaking infrastructure projects, do the barons at Jogoo House read these things or the daily newspapers delivered to their offices are meant for wrapping meat?
Growing up, education and health sectors used to the spine that kept the body of our country alive. For decades on end, there was a consistent mission to train medics and high performing teachers, equip the health and education sectors with state of the art infrastructure that was the envy of the region.
For a long time, our neighbouring countries have been flying into Kenya to benchmark with the standards of practice in our education system as it produced globally competitive human resource personnel. The same cannot be said now, and it is not difficult to see why.
The KCSE 2024 class has less than five weeks to receive government capitation towards sourcing for the reagents required for their Chemistry practicals, toolkits for Physics and biological organisms for their Biology labs. It’s the least they’re asking for right now, and you cannot begrudge them because they have paid for it with their dedication to learning and commitment to the future transformation of their country all year. At their most hour of need, it would be unfortunate to abandon them.
The threat by school heads to close schools early to prevent learners from starving is not news that the government would want the public to normalise. There would be no need to keep the public education system going if children of poor people who cannot afford private schools are going to be taught piecemeal curriculum and served half-baked food while being expected to remain globally competitive.
We understand that the government is currently struggling to make ends meet and may not afford to revive the stalled projects in schools before the end of the academic year. While we could spend the whole day reminding them of the leakages in the public finance system that could have saved shored up the purse had the holes been sealed, this is the time to focus on the fierce urgency of now; and that is to ensure the facilitation of the smooth transition of the final year class of 2024, as the government struggles to sit upright. These kids are not asking for the moon but the bare necessities of their academic life.
If a supplier is going to arrest a secondary school principal for delay in payment for goods and services rendered, then the government has succeeded in discouraging our children from considering the teaching profession as a noble career.
Before long, our schools will begin to hemorrhage human resource to other market-driven professions full with bloody shortcuts and quick fixes. If the government wanted to widen the gap between the haves and the have-nots, why hide behind the impeachment of Rigathi Gachagua?
