This pathetic narrative is but a symptom of a deeper problem that is facing the Kenyan education system which has been allowed to disintegrate due to incompetence and corruption and arrant stupidity at all administrative levels.
The sage who opined that the collapse of education is the collapse of a nation must have had Kenya in mind since Ochieng is unable to fathom exactly when the rain started to beat the nation. It all began when the toxic culture of corruption took deep roots in Kenya.
There is a rather meaningless ritual we undertake as a country every year and that is the National Day of Prayer where we invite the world through their embassies and high commissions to let them witness our hypocritical appeal for God’ s guidance.
This year the Dagoretti MP Beatrice Elachi captured the soul of the country when in her prayer she lamented that Kenyans have loved money more than country. This proclamation begins at the top to the bottom, it was befitting that the president was in attendance.
She bemoaned that Kenyans have been abandoned by their leaders who lacked integrity and a sense of service all in the search of the quick buck. No sector has felt this neglect more than the education sector.
Kenya has systematically lowered the quality of education by allowing unscrupulous behavior at all levels and stages of a process that is supposed to ensure we produce the correct caliber of graduates the country needs for development.
Ochieng is confident that what must have started as a well-intentioned review of a syllabus that was supposed to produce the right type of graduates that the country
Kenya is sitting on a time bomb of social unrest, directly traceable to the mishandling of the education sector by ignorant politicians. Education should not be a privilege but a right that is accessible to all if the country hopes to rise above the morass of dire underdevelopment.
needs to sustain economic development has spiraled out of control.
Kenya felt, and correctly so, that the syllabus then was not serving the needs of Kenya and needed to exit the British curriculum. What should have been a manpower planning exercise became a political project just because the president was once a teacher.
The introduction of the 8 4 4 system was shambolic at best and an unmitigated nightmare for teachers and the system went through so many iterations that by the time it was being eclipsed by the Competency Based Curriculum CBC system it was still undergoing change.
One has to wonder why the education dons would not just have panel beaten the 8 4 4 system to fit into what they needed to achieve. History will never be able to judge if the system achieved its objectives or not since it was so unstable.
The country is now grappling with the introduction of a CBC system which the teachers don’ t understand and have not been trained but are expected to roll out. Parents have been roped into an education experiment they don’ t grasp.
Parents no longer know who is in school, whether it is them or the children and no one thought it necessary to involve all stakeholders when the political decision was made to change the education system without piloting it.
That the country was not ready for the new syllabus is evident and what is even more disconcerting is the fact that the greatest opponent to the new system is the teachers’ unions who correctly claim that they are not ready to implement it.
They have gone as far as to question the urgency of the introduction of the new system and have reiterated that the country is not on fire. There is no rationale as to why the country should be compelled to roll out an unfinished plan.
What level of madness permits political expediency to overrule those charged with the implementation of the system. Ochieng is aware that the president purports to hold a PhD degree and should therefore be academically inclined to understand and sort out the mess.
Kenya has now an ambivalent system where nobody yet knows if junior high school is in primary or secondary schools. The infrastructure has not kept pace with the new syllabus and therefore students make a transition without a change of status.
When you dig deeper you find that the decisions are being driven by corrupt deals where people are benefiting from the physical transitions even though the changes are not in any way aimed at benefitting the country- Elachi has a point on the love of money.
So, the game playing out in Meru with Ochieng’ s nephew is symptomatic of the general malaise that has afflicted Kenyans where tenderpreneurs actually believe they are entrepreneurs and if that is what the education system is spewing forth, may God help us.
Unfortunately, the corruption bug has afflicted Kenya’ s highest institutions of learning. During Kibaki’ s era there was an explosion of universities where every county felt it was a matter of singular pride to have a university domiciled in their locality.
We are currently in the middle of council room wars, if such a phrase exists where the country’ s preeminent university UON, has been embroiled in a vicious internal squabble between the university council and the vice chancellor.
This war is not only tarnishing the good name of the university but also paralyzing the institution and creating uncertainty and concern as the ugly fight plays out into the public domain. Dig deeper and control of resources is at the center of the controversy.
During Moi’ s error, the president raided