the university to bolster the image of a country in trouble by appointing vice chancellors and other dons into prominent government positions and succeeded in politicizing the institution as a conduit to power.
This turned the former center of academic excellence into a channel for better emoluments and the brutal competition in the university became a need to be spoted by the administration and not the furthering of academic excellence.
The universities became commercial and were soon dishing out doctorates to unqualified candidates so long as they were in a position to pay. These universities even facilitated fraud by politicians who were required to have degrees to qualify for elective positions.
As this drama was unfolding, the bright needy students were being shunted into understaffed and crowded universities where they were unable to get the needed level of attention to excel. The unhelpful, ill-conceived funding system HELB did not help.
Ochieng has always had issues with the HELB system, which mirrors the American system and whose main consequence is students completing studies in heavy debt yet there are no jobs to ensure their capacity to repay the loans.
America is caught up in an unsustainable student loan crisis and Kenya is already in trouble and the new controversial funding model has just added fuel to an already volatile situation as the new model is open to even more manipulation.
Students have been put in a‘ can’ t pay won’ t pay situation’ as the country turns its brightest into criminals as loan defaulters yet all they were looking for was education which in Kenya had been the great equalizer. The normal route to a better life is being shut for the needy.
The government has ceased direct capitation to universities, asking them to find ways of being sustainable and this has led to a financial crisis at the tertiary level where universities are run down and many are actually unviable and on the verge of collapse.
The new funding model that is supposed to assist needy students based on their financial vulnerability has become the new corruption avenue as students find themselves underfunded and unable to survive on what is being offered to them.
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.
The new funding model was supposed to ensure equity in access to education and was to target bright disadvantaged student. But this student-based model is cumbersome and highly subjective since the need assessment mechanism is impossible to implement.
While the public system is undergoing myriad challenges, the very same system that Kenya rejected as unsuitable for Kenya is alive and well. In Kenya you can go to school from kindergarten to university in the British system supplemented by the American.
The catch is that this system is private and since parents always want what is best for their children, the financially able parent has avoided the disaster that is the public system and put their children in a stable, tested and trusted system.
Kenya happens to be the only country Ochieng knows where children can be in the same school but pursuing different systems. A bizarre situation where you find some students on holiday while others are in school depending on the system they are enrolled in.
This dual education system has inadvertently created the very inequality that the public sector experiment has been trying to address and avoid. In fact, the complicated funding model is redundant given that the financially able students choose the British system.
Every student on queue for the public Kenyan system is technically needy and what the government has done is to exacerbate the situation and Kenya is slowly but surely becoming a country of fifty billionaires and fifty million beggars.
I would actually be okay if the fifty billionaires have earned their money by productive endeavors that develop the country and not through the grand theft of public resources which are then
syphoned abroad.
The irrevocably corrupt regime currently in power has decided that what Kenyans earn is their personal ATMs and through ridiculous taxation for self-serving grandiose projects are systematically ensuring that Kenyans have no disposable income.
While the chasm of inequality widens, fueled by the mess that is in the education sector, and while the leadership continues to pretend that there is free education in Kenya which the needy cannot afford, the country continues to teeter towards economic collapse.
The last word seems to point to the fact that it is true Kenya does not require a war to destroy it, the inept ruling class are going to achieve it by maiming the education system with corruption and incompetence.
The country actually needs a masterplan to extricate itself from the social problems that the mismanagement of the education sector has already caused and whose repercussions will inevitably be felt in the not too far a future.
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.
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