Hungry teachers are a danger to society: not because they are cruel people, but because hunger is a cruel condition.
A teacher who is underpaid, stalled in rank, denied increments and asked to run a school with delayed capitation is not empowered. They are cornered. And when authority is cornered, it hardens. At the gates of transition — admission, promotion, examination — teachers become enforcers in a system that has already failed them.
This month, parents whose children were moving into Grade 10 learnt the truth quickly. When the State starves schools and demoralises teachers, households are conscripted to step in. They pay for uniforms at inflated prices. They buy textbooks that the government has already borrowed Sh27 billion from the World Bank to supply. “Free education” ends the moment a child shows up at the school gate.
Government insists, loudly and repeatedly, that education is free. Louder even than a street evangelist. Yet it presides over schools that cannot buy books, feed students, run laboratories, or pay support staff. Teachers are told to absorb austerity quietly: larger classes, heavier workloads, frozen careers, and promises that never mature.
For parents, it is a hostage situation. Pay — or your child suffers penalties for fees that officially do not exist.
Kenya has allocated nearly Sh700 billion to education this year. Yet the system still runs on fumes and improvisation. Such as the presidential directive to admit students with or without fees. This is where political discretion replaces predictable financing. This contradiction has birthed bursaries — marketed as compassion, but in truth they are a confession. Bursaries exist because free education does not.
Teachers whose own salaries have stagnated are tasked with collecting millions in levies. This poisons relationships. Every payment becomes a negotiation. Every request carries suspicion.
Parents assume exploitation. Teachers plead necessity. Classrooms stop being civic spaces and turn into transactional marketplaces. The Constitution says education is a right. In practice, it is a favour rationed by cash flow.
Two failures sit in plain sight. Schools are underfunded. Teachers are underpaid and professionally frozen. Instead of fixing either, politicians insert themselves between parents and schools. Citizens are forced to beg individuals instead of demanding systems.
Bursaries allow politicians to look helpful while avoiding policy repair. Teachers watch MPs distribute cheques as their own negotiations on pay, promotions and conditions are postponed indefinitely.
In a country where proximity to power determines outcomes, discretion rewards familiarity — not need. The poorest families, short on time, confidence and paperwork, are left out.
By focusing on access rather than outcomes, bursaries also distract from harder questions around quality, relevance and utility. Teachers’ grievances are reduced to fiscal inconveniences.
Worse still, bursaries corrode the moral logic of free education. They reintroduce stigma. Families must prove poverty. Children in the same classroom are split into the deserving and the undeserving. Underinvestment is the norm, and underpayment is legitimised.
A State that truly believes in free education should treat endless bursaries, perpetual teacher unrest, ballooning STEM classes, collapsing arts streams and graduate unemployment as alarm bells. Kenya has chosen to treat them as background noise — wrapped in the language of care, competitiveness and restraint.
Beneath this lies a deeper collapse: the value of education itself. Kenya now treats education as faith rather than economics. Certificates multiply, but jobs do not. Faced with this contradiction, policy has reached for a new superstition — STEM as salvation. Science, technology, engineering and mathematics are sold as guaranteed pipelines to prosperity, even as classrooms overflow, laboratories decay, and the labour market refuses to absorb those already trained.
Learners are flooding into STEM not because the economy demands them, but because the State has run out of honest stories about education’s worth. The arts are quietly disappearing — not because they lack value but because they ask dangerous questions about work, power and society.
Parents are urged to sacrifice more for schooling that is supposedly future-proof. Learners are channelled into overcrowded STEM tracks with promises of employability. Graduates will discover the truth later: the promise was never backed by industrial policy, job creation or planning.
First, families are told education is free — even as they pay informally through levies and contributions. Then they are told education guarantees prosperity — even as graduates queue endlessly. When jobs fail to appear, blame shifts from policy to person. Unemployment becomes an individual failure, not a State one.
Basic education must be costed honestly. It must be funded predictably. Agreements with teachers — who actually run the system — must be honoured. And Members of Parliament must legislate and oversee, not perform charity in a broken system.
Until the State feeds schools properly, respects teachers, and stops selling false promises of prosperity through education, free education will remain a slogan.
The 405 people in Parliament who can fix this are still clinging on bursaries — to cover not a funding gap, but an intellectual nakedness.
The writer is a board member of the Kenya Human Rights Commission and writes in his individual capacity. @kwamchetsi; [email protected]
