The theme of this year’s Kenya National Music Festival, as well as the rules and calendar of events for Term Two, was unveiled during a week-long workshop for adjudicators and trainers at Nakuru Girls High School in Nakuru County.
This year’s event, which will be the 95th edition, will feature several new categories sponsored by various organisations, making it richer in content and themes.
Speaking during the workshop, festival executive secretary Janet Lang’at said that the theme of this year’s event will be “ Nurturing Talent for Innovation and Development”.
Ms Lang’at said the theme is meant to promote one of the festival’s main missions; to harness, nurture and expose talent and creativity through t music, dance and elocution.
“The Kenya National Music Festival aims to educate through entertainment and this is very much in tandem with this year’s theme,” said Lang’at.
Among the new categories in this year’s event are promoting safe use of the internet — which is sponsored by the Communications Authority of Kenya — and developing local and global citizenship, sponsored by the Kenya Institute of Curriculum Development (KICD). Kenya Rural Roads Authority, Kenya Railways Corporation, Kenya Tourism Board, and Brooke East Africa among other organisations will also be sponsoring themes.
Uraia Kenya, a non-governmental organisation whose focus is on civic education, will be sponsoring a solo and choral verse category named “Elections in Kenya and Utu”. In this category, Uraia aims to create awareness, especially among the youth, on the importance and relevance of elections, choosing good leaders and exercising patriotism by taking part in elections.
Uraia, in a statement released when announcing the partnership, decried voter apathy in Kenya, especially among the youth.
The organisation said that it hopes that the partnership will enable students, who are future voters and political candidates, to gain more interest in participating in the political and democratic processes.
In a country where almost all general elections are mired in apathy and controversy, Uraia hopes to create interest on the subject in Kenyans from a young age and also to uphold national values through what it calls Utu.
