Kenya's Flight From Theory

Gabriel Nderitu wants to fly. The 49 year old  amateur airplane builder from Othaya has become an annual fixture on our TV screens as he tries out yet another of his contraptions that stubbornly won’t get off the ground. By 2014, Gabriel had reportedly spent a million shillings on his frustrated passion. And though we can't help but admire his chutzpah and determination, it is curious that over a century after the Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk, Gabriel, and several others like him across Kenya, are not soaring.

The answer probably has something to do with Kenya's peculiar approach to learning. With a conference underway in Nairobi to discuss the scrapping of the 8-4-4 system of education, there is a marked preference for “practical” as opposed to “book” learning. Opening the conference, Deputy President William Ruto railed against university classrooms that teach Vasco da Gama but not how to fix a lamp. One radio station tweeted: “Kenyans propose curriculum system that emphasizes on skills not theory & exams”.

"Theory" has become a dirty word. Yet it, or rather the lack of it, is perhaps the reason why Gabriel and his friends are staying grounded for now. It is also the reason why Kenyan dreams of economic and political success have yet to take fight. This was well illustrated last week in the reaction to an opinion piece by Dr David Ndii.

That the article made for uncomfortable reading is an understatement. Dr Ndii’s proposal that Kenya consider balkanising into ethnic statelets in the event of a post-election conflagration triggered by a “sham” 2017 poll, had many frothing at the mouth and calling for his arrest. It has also led to an earnest debate about what nationhood is and why Kenya has seemingly failed to propagate a successful national narrative.

Many of the explanations put forward lay the blame on ethnicity. “The tribe has eaten the nation,” Dr Ndii wrote. He Kenyan elite, he argues, has preferred a tribal discourse and spurned several opportunities to nurture a national one. He sees Kenyan tribes in an abusive relationship with one another and proposes dissolution of the marriage as a viable option. Other, while not going so far, still accept that the basic problem is one of tribe versus nation.

However, this is lazy thinking and the frameworks employed obscure rather than explain the true nature of our problems. For the Kenyan people are not in an abusive marriage with each other. They are in an abusive relationship with their governing elites. The underlying reality is one of a state created by the British to extract resources from the local population and feed them up to an elite few. This state, which preys on wananchi for the benefit of wenyenchi has not been fundamentally reformed since independence.

"Will the elite which has inherited power from the colonialists use that power to bring about the necessary social and economic changes or will they … become part of the Old Establishment?" the future President, Mwai Kibaki, asked in 1964.

History has shown that they chose the latter path. As noted by Professor Daniel Branch in his book Kenya: Between Hope and Despair, “elites have encouraged Kenyans to think and act politically in a manner informed first and foremost by ethnicity, in order to crush demands for the redistribution of scarce resources.”

In using tribe as opposed to class to frame their analysis, Dr Ndii and many of his detractors fall into this trap. They fail to see that that the problem is not one of tribes robbing each other, but of a ravenous elite stealing from everybody else and hyping ethnicity to cover their tracks.

Far from wasting time, better theorising would lead to better solutions and learning from history is critical to not repeating past mistakes. Like Gabriel, if Kenya is to reach for the sky, it would do well to spend at least as much time thinking through theories of how things work as it does tinkering in the backyard.

Kenya's War On Its Kids

Today’s teargassing by police of pupils from the Langata Rd Primary School protesting the grabbing of their school playground, has drawn condemnation from across the political divide. At least it has on Twitter. If there is one thing around which Kenyans can be relied on to congregate, it is their kids. The welfare of the young ones is routinely trundled out as a justification of governmental action and societal outrage at everything from corruption to homosexuality. However, it is all a charade.

In truth, Kenya is a country at war with its own children. Children are the denizens of the future. And Kenya is busy destroying the future. Government policy, elite greed as well as citizen apathy and disempowerment have combined to rob our kids of more than playgrounds.

What the police did today was deplorable. But it is no more deplorable than the violence of poverty, ignorance and disease that many children are forced to live with on a daily basis. Or that the education system is a complete shambles.

It is no worse than the fact that kids in Baringo have to cross croc-and-hippo infested waters in skimpy rafts to get to school. Nor that when they do get to school, half the time, their undermotivated, underequipped and underpaid teachers don’t even bother to show up. 

If they cared, Kenyans would collectively hang their heads in shame over the fact that over 100,000 youngsters die annually before their fifthbirthday, most within the first year of life and most from easily preventable causes. Or that our current spending spree is robbing the future to pay for the present, saddling kids with debt even before they have had a chance to earn their first shilling. According to the opposition CORD coalition, when the Jubilee government came to power, every Kenyan owed Ksh.44,000. A year later, each owed Ksh.66,000 and by 2017 each would owe Ksh.140,000. It is disgraceful that their futures are being mortgaged away so a few can have opportunities to eat now.

Kenya lives in the present, and in the moment. Little thought is given to how we got here and where we are going.  We studiously refuse to learn lessons from the past. Our contempt for historical accuracy leads us to fete the villains and condemn the heroes of our past. Our ignorance makes us easy prey for ravenous politicians and cements their impunity. To date, for example, the report of the Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission, our first real attempt to lay bare the bones within our common closet, continues to gather dust.

As the saying goes, those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. The constitution, meant to be the single greatest governance achievement of the past quarter century, is being systematically undermined in the same manner its predecessor was, its strong guarantee of freedoms effectively reduced to mere suggestions. Similarly, we are condemning our kids to a future that will be no better than our past.

Along with their history, we are also robbing them of their heritage. Wildlife poaching, which has now reached crisis proportions, continues unabated and with the acquiescence, if not active support, of the government. We have already pretty much lost the fight to save the legendary tuskers and, according to one study, across the continent, more elephants are being killed each year than are being born. At this rate, within a century children will only be able to see rhinos and elephants in books or a museum.

Values too seem to be going extinct, especially in the public sphere. Watching the adults practice politics, our children learn that honesty and integrity do not matter are words emptied of meaning. They learn that a good, well-reasoned argument is no match for demagoguery, bullying and violence; that your last name is the greatest political and economic asset (or liability) that you have.

Further, youth is constantly reproduced solely as a place of either innocence, ignorance or incitement. Youth cannot think for itself. Youth can have no agency or politics. That must wait till tomorrow. Thus children protesting the theft of their playground must be incited. Young adults who take to the streets to challenge power must be drug-addled. The cannot articulate legitimate grievance. They can have no ideas or solutions to offer. They cannot offer leadership today, only tomorrow.

All this is a form of violence. A betrayal of the inter-generational pact that parents provide for, support and protect their children. That we should leave for them a better world than the one we found.

So today we will shed tears over the treatment meted out to the kids of the Langata Road Primary School. Today, we will raise our voices in anger. And it is right that we do so. However, we must also protest the violence our kids are subjected to every day in our name and resolve to undo the world of hurt that we have been storing up for them. Otherwise, it would all be an exercise in hypocrisy.

We must realize the truth: that our children face far worse things than teargas canisters. And that the adults must stop fighting them and start fighting for them.

Is Kenya Becoming A Nation Of 50 Intellectuals And 50M Illiterates?

In September, 1972, the late JM Kariuki gave a startling speech at Kamusinga, in what is now Bungoma County. In it he called for a re-evaluation of the direction the country was headed in a mere decade after independence. “A small but powerful group of greedy, self-seeking elite in the form of politicians, civil servants and businessmen has steadily but very surely monopolized the fruits of independence to the exclusion of the majority of our people,” he noted before uttering the refrain that he is today most remembered by: “We do not want a Kenya of ten millionaires and ten million beggars.”

Within three years, he would be brutally murdered by agents of that elite but today, it is clear that his words have proven prophetic. We have become one of the most unequal societies on earth, with resources and opportunities percolating to a very few at the very top while a decent standard of living is denied to the vast multitude at the bottom. Despite all the excitement about becoming a middle-income country, a report released earlier this year showed that Kenya today has 31 centa-millionaires, that is individuals with a net worth of more than $100 million, while nearly half the population lives on less than $2 per day. However, nothing illustrates this better than the approach consecutive governments have taken towards education policy.

Undoubtedly, the greatest investment a country can make is in the education of its people. It is the most effective way to create opportunity and move people out of poverty. An educated populace makes healthier and more profitable choices. Educated citizens are better able to hold governments to account, to participate effectively in decision making and to create more equitable societies.

In Kenya, while we spend just under a fifth of the national budget on education and have managed to expand access to all levels of education, the fact is, with quality standards nose-diving, the KANU, NARC and Jubilee governments have all preferred to view the sector primarily as a political and economic cash cow.

From the introduction of the 8-4-4 system to free primary education, the fact is that past government interventions have been motivated less by the long-term needs of students and more by the short-term interests of politicians and corrupt businessmen. This cavalier approach has destroyed our schools, demotivated our teachers and killed any hope of learning. Needless to say, none of the elite making these decisions educate their own children in public schools. In fact, it bespeaks the quality of instruction offered in our schools that up to half of teachers do not bother to turn up for class and that even when public education is nominally free, parents who can afford to have chosen to take their kids to private schools. This has had the effect of driving up the cost of private schooling, and locking the poor majority into the failing public system.

There is an urgent need to begin to undo the damage that politicizing education has wrought but the Jubilee government has singularly proven itself unable to resist the twin temptations of politically-inspired gimmickry and grand corruption.

The ill-thought out proposal floated earlier in the year to have pupils in primary school taught in local languages demonstrated the superficial approach the government continues to take towards education. It is unclear how, if at all, such a policy could be implemented in Kenya’s ethnically diverse counties without entrenching tribal chauvinism and discriminating against minorities. It is the very antithesis of a policy that would build national cohesion and heal ethnic rifts and is reflective of the thinking of an administration that feels it can only perpetuate itself through creating a “tyranny of numbers”.

The other flagship education policy of the Jubilee government has been shown to be at best little more than a PR gimmick, or worse, a scheme to corruptly enrich a few individuals under the guise of improving education. Ignoring the fact that many schools lack even the most basic of amenities including desks, books and even classrooms, the one-laptop-per-child initiative, in common with other proposed mega-projects, is a simplistic concept whose tendering process has been fraught with irregularity, if not outright illegality.

And it is not just Jubilee that lacks seriousness when it comes to education. Their opponents in the CORD coalition have also demonstrated an appetite for short-term opportunistic points-scoring as an alternative to long term solutions.

Take for example, the fate of the 1999 report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Education System of Kenya. The Commission, which was chaired by Dr Davy Koech, was mandated to enquire into the education system and recommend changes and approaches that would help prepare Kenyan society to face the challenges of the 21st century.

Its report, which remains relevant 15 years later, recommended a “goal- and a process-oriented education and training system” as an alternative to the present exam-driven system. Under the rubric of TIQET (Totally Integrated Quality Education and Training), it emphasized lifelong learning and constant improvement not just in learners but of the education system itself, as well an emphasis on quality.

It eschews piecemeal and politically driven approaches, such as the obsession with abolishing of school fees, in favour of a holistic and comprehensive approach to education. Needless to say, the report was never implemented. The then Minister for Education, Kalonzo Musyoka – now a principal in the CORD coalition- declared that it was too expensive. However, he was not above supporting the even more expensive and failing Free Primary Education less than four years later or proposing Free Secondary Education as part of his platform for the 2007 elections.

The truth is, across the political divide, education has been treated as a forum for political grandstanding. However, we as citizens must get serious about fixing the system. We must not reduce or equate education reform to simply providing free schooling.  Otherwise , given the experience of FPE and to paraphrase JM Kariuki, we risk creating a nation of 50 intellectuals and 50 million functional illiterates.

As he advocated, there must be a change, not just in policy, but in the policy-making process as well, so that the interests of all are taken into account. We must come together to demand accountability from the government and to generate serious and comprehensive proposals for reform.

This will require a commitment to squarely facing up to the crisis in our schools and resisting the distractions and gimmicks offered up by our politicians. A good place to start would be would be by insisting on the review and implementation of the recommendations of the Koech report. For, as Derek Curtis Bok, the American lawyer, educator and the former president of Harvard University said, “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.”

The Real Tyranny Of Numbers

Cabinet Secretary for National Treasury, Henry Rotich, yesterday unveiled a budget which included measures to reintroduce the controversial VAT Bill which, he says, seeks "reduce the cost of compliance" with our tax collection mechanisms. This Bill, which will likely see a large increase in the price of basic commodities including food, sanitary towels and books, is presented by a government that during the election promised to lift 10 million people out of poverty.

How this is achieved by making everything from sanitary towels to food and books 16% more expensive and driving up the cost of living sounds very much like modern-day alchemy. But that is until you consider how our system works. You see, in Kenya, policy is not about helping human beings -individuals or even communities. It is about the statistics and indices whose upward or downward trend is a measure of our success or failure as a society.

These figures and averages, instead of providing insight, are now used to mask reality. The joke goes, when Bill Gates walks into a bar, on average everyone there becomes a millionaire. Similarly, the growth in averages like GDP, is used to hide the fact that much of society is still actually deeply steeped in poverty and that much of the increase in wealth is concentrated at the top. We define poverty by how much disposable income a family has, not by, for example, whether they can access a decent hospital and how far they have to walk to get there. Thus our solution is not to build more health centers, but to grow the economy.

This tyranny of numbers, the triumph of neo-liberal thought, is having a real and disturbing effect on how we understand ourselves and our society.  We have been transformed from wananchi to taxpayers, from citizens to consumers. The economic relationships have been privileged above all others. It is of course reflective of a global trend where entire countries and regions are now referred to as nothing more than markets.

We are encouraged to think of ourselves as disposable units of production; our land, history, art, culture, and even education as nothing more than repositories of monetary value. Thus we prostitute our traditions for the sake of a few tourist and politician dollars. Art becomes investment, not a means for society to understand itself. Wildlife is not a heritage to be studied and understood but a resource to be sustainably monetized.

Journalism is today about performance and entertainment, not information and education. The news is a show and the electorate little more than a passive audience. Why would they be expected to be interested in, much less understand, the nuances of something as boring and undoubtedly complex as voting systems or the VAT Bill? Leave it to the pundits, lawyers, politicians and economists. They know best.

We are even passing this on to our children. Earlier this week, Cabinet Secretary for Education Jacob Kaimenyi, announced that engineering and medical students in public universities are to pay more than their counterparts in the humanities. Lecturers' pay is to be similarly differentiated. The message is crystal clear. Some university courses are more preferable and profitable. Some knowledge, especially sciences and tech, is more desirable. Education is not about molding minds and unleashing creativity. It is about generating a globally competitive workforce. Students are future workers not thinkers.

A lecturer in Makerere University describes it as the “marketization” of education. “Our society has lost track of the meaning and value of knowledge and education,” says Mwambutsya Ndebesa, who teaches History. In fact, many universities have already started operating, in the words of Christopher Lucas, author of Our Western Educational Heritage, as “an appendage to the world of business.” A study carried out a few years ago revealed that although courses such as agriculture, conflict resolution, criminology, disaster management, literature, poetry, and ethical education, though more relevant to sustainable development, are being relegated to the back burner.

This contraction in our imagination of what it means to be a human being, or a citizen, explains why we are so easily bought off, so easily "misled" by our politicians. It explains why our idea of Kenya is more akin to a cake than a country; why we speak of turns to eat; and why governance is about sating appetites, not service. It is why we continue to be ruled by the demagogue, the tribalist, the mendacious and the kleptomaniac.

It is why we are content to reduce our citizenship to mere economic participation and condition fundamental rights on economic status. Why we are happy for poor kids to attend free schools without asking about the quality of the education they are getting. Why we are blind to our history, and the history of that history. Why we fear to ask difficult questions and are constantly terrified by the violence we believe simmers under the surface of our otherwise "peaceful" political life.

The fact is, we will not grow our way out of these issues. Economic growth will not be a panacea for the inequality and poverty that afflicts our society. On the contrary, it will exacerbate them. We must rethink the rationale of the state, the why of Kenya. We must break out from the tyranny of the numbers and realize that the economy and the market exist to serve us, not the other way round.