There is an old, drab and mucky school in Kenya doing the rounds on social media. It looks tired and dated and in desperate need of a lick of paint or two if not total modernisation. However, the area leadership thought the school deserved cabro pavements around it instead.
This is a school in rural Kenya where most pupils are used to walking barefoot on muddy paths. Cabro pavements did not seem like a priority for that school given its dilapidated state. The money could have gone to books, lab or even paint to spruce up the walls a little.
The best option would have been to build a new modern school where cabro pavement would have fitted in better. However, cabro-craze in this instance, like in many other infrastructure projects in Kenya, has become another cash-cow. They are fit where they don’t fit — for money!
Education in the hands of Kenyan politicians was always going to retrograde. Like the health sector, their only involvement is for political reasons or corruption but not to offer better services. Professionals in many fields have been pushed to one side as politics determines who gets educated, employed, healed and lives.
Bursaries and CDF funds are more useful at bribing politicians than they are at bringing education and development to the grassroots. The two should never be in the hands of politicians in the first place. There are ministries tasked with delivering service and they should be spearheading most of the projects. It is unnecessary duplication of work.
The abuse and indignity suffered by Kenyans as politicians are allowed to hold the purse strings for bursaries and CDF is quite shocking. The effects of such funds are not being felt and Kenyans continue to be poor and children continue to struggle with school fees.
Bursaries are in fact being used as carrot and stick by politicians, if there is any left from corruption that is. They are offered in discriminatory fashion with tribe, friends and families benefitting over needy students. Politicians use CDF and bursaries like it is their personal funds. One MP even filmed himself with a pupil carrying a placard thanking him for giving him bursary.
The indignity the child and the family are made to suffer completely lost on the politician. If Kenyans remember, computerisation scheme for schools became a project to offer free computers for politicians who swindled them for cash or turned them for their personal use. The political tentacles are now also being felt at the Teachers Service Commission as teachers’ employment and transfers are all left at the hands of politicians. This means if a teacher knows no politician, however great they are, they stagnate, with pupils and students suffering.
The mess in our education system is felt from nursery schools all the way to universities where the latter have become tribal outfits and money guzzlers, not to mention Mecca for fake degrees. The phrase ‘politics eats its own children’ can be felt more within the education sector perhaps than in other sectors. Where children are denied life-time opportunities, starting with the poor management of the education sector and corruption within it allowed to fester.
The sector is undermined by none other than politicians who have been elected to ensure that every child gets the right to education, and that education is not only the preserve of the children of politicians but for all the children of Kenya.
The runaway corruption and poor management of the education sector is a recipe for disaster. Politicisation of the sector will undermine growth of the country as it will greatly impact on development of personnel with quality skills required to spur the economy.
Free education for primary and secondary school is crucial for countries like Kenya, firstly, to create equity in the education system where every child is given a chance to quality education and, secondly, it is used as a springboard to nurture essential skills in human resource to help build and sustain a great economic model. Singapore, favoured by our politicians busy undermining education for the poor, invests heavily in education in order to tap into the skills of the graduates to build the country. It is a bigger economy than Kenya because it invested in the education of its people first.
If Kenya is serious about building the country and the economy for that matter, it must take politicians and politics out of education. The Ministry of Education must be the sole provider of education services and all the funds for education ought to be channelled through the ministry.
Bursaries and CDF are for human resource development and not for campaigning or bribing politicians. This is where the government gets it wrong.
Political sharks are destroying the country by spreading their greed into every facet of the public sector. We need to save the Education docket from greedy politicians to save the future generation. It is only fair that young people get a shot at a better life through excellent education. It can be done!
