Word came out this week that Members of Parliament (MPs) are not happy with the manner in which the Ministry of Education has been rolling out messaging for the new university funding model, that has forced the president to order for the recall of admission letters leaving ministry officials fighting to explain in diagrams why they shouldn’t be sent home to be with their families.
To begin with, there is no sound communication strategy that can cure a bad policy. The old adage rings true; that if you cannot explain a policy in the language of your grandmother, that’s your first sign that either the policy is bad or the disseminator is clueless, or both – which seems to be the case for the new university funding model.
To make it worse, government officials have taken the bottom-up campaign slogan too far, choosing to take advantage of their weekends in the village to gatecrash at funerals hoping to use the wow factor to talk to villagers about government policy.
Village funerals are not the best value for advocacy money for government programmes – any programme. We understand the Gen Z protests introduced a new layer of transparency and accountability by public officials swimming in taxpayers’ money but using a village funeral to justify your daily subsistence allowance and business class air ticket to your rural home every weekend is nowhere near prudent use of slimming resources.
Had the president intended that the new university funding model be designed for the dead and their grieving relatives, the headquarters of the Universities Fund would’ve been based at Lee Funeral Home.
Funerals are sombre venues to talk about policy topics that require a peaceful mind and a light heart in between taking notes and making follow up inquiries. Besides, the schedule of the day is crammed to accommodate the never-ending speeches by the retinue of relatives who need to return to the corner of their world before the last light – in the villages where there is deterioration of security and depletion of personal resources, any extra hour spent outside the grieving window automatically leads to skyrocketing inflation on the pockets of the bereaved who must hire private security and part with extra transport money to get back home without a cut on their necks.
These compounding factors make it difficult for the bereaved families to appreciate intrusion by government officials ramming down bureaucratic policy in the guise of clarifying old policy and disseminating new ones. Half the time mean looking ushers are evicting locals sitting in the wrong tent meant for in-laws who require cleansing before coming into contact with their sons who have defaulted on dowry fees. If the MC is not jumping on the mic after every five minutes to inform the next lot that their food is ready, the programme is being interrupted by a wailing dog being whipped for crimes related to robbery with violence.
Furthermore, villagers often have to contend with inconveniences occasioned by the breakdown in customary law and natural order on funeral site, which adds brand new flavour in the funeral experience and gives the villagers something to gossip about in the peripheral markets and local liquor dens until the next funeral comes around.
More often than not, funeral attendees will remember the number of angry bodyguards a government official gatecrashed the function with. If the government official was to say something about the university funding model at a funeral, the parts of the speech that will form part of the village oral literature would be about the ones involving calling the children of the bereaved in front and wiping away their tears with a full government scholarship.
This week, when Members of Parliament (MPs) interrupted normal House proceedings to complain about the deteriorating state of higher education in Kenya, the bulk of their concerns centred around the cloudy nature of the Higher Education Funding model in the face of the looming deadline for confused new university students. You know your country is doing badly when those intended to write laws and clarify grey areas are also groping in the dark about a policy they shouldn’t have allowed the executive to rollout before passing through the wringer at Parliament.
When Gen Z stormed the streets two months ago to protest at Parliament’s deafness on the plight of the suffering citizen, the rallying cry was for the Finance Bill 2024 to reflect the forlorn economic reality on the ground where suffering Kenyans walk on each morning to make ends meet. For a long time, public participation had been the preserve of MPs who were hitherto assumed to represent the needs and plight of those who slaved in the sun to put them into office.
Events this past week should be enough to prove to the mandarins at the Education Ministry that they have a small window remaining to win back the confidence of the public education stakeholders who are increasingly getting sick and tired of the chaotic nature in which education programmes are being launched and relaunched.
Explaining simple terms like the categorization of the scholarship cadres, or bands, for students applying for university funding should not sound like rocket science for parents a majority of whom are not blessed with the privilege of seeing the four walls of English school.
To the generation of parents whose children are currently struggling to access the university funding portal, a band is a small group of musicians who play popular music such as jazz, rock, or pop. When you ask them which band their children applying for university funding fall, the answers you shall receive range from TP OK Jazz Band, Les Wanyika, Sauti Sol, Hart the Band, or Just a Band. To introduce a new meaning to the term among university students is to give them a smartphone without internet bundles.
This country is on autopilot at all the levels of public policy – it is safe to say that the chaos is so dizzying that everyone has resorted to operating at basal metabolic rate as the whole country waits for the second return of Jesus.
