I’ve told this story before, but I’ll tell it again.
 
I returned from completing my studies abroad with a crisis of confidence. I knew that Kenya was against the arts, and that I would be mocked for studying them. And I was. I got to the classroom and found no students, and was hounded that there is no “market” for our programs. 

I believed it and I did try to fix it. Every weekend I was at festivals, talks, events, trying to hear what it was that the “market” wanted from arts programs and how we could provide it. ​

Theater scholar Gĩchingiri Ndĩgĩrĩgĩ writes that in 1991, at the height of the clamour for multi-partyism, the government denied a license for the staging of a play “Drumbeats of Kirinyaga,” by Oby Obyerodhiambo.

​The reason given was that the play portrayed an ethnically diverse and politically cohesive Kenya, which contradicted the president’s argument at the time that Kenya was too ethnically divided for multi-partyism.
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While President Moi was claiming to care for Kenyans who are too tribal, his government was ironically also suppressing any public display of Kenyans transcending their tribal identities. The government needed to encourage tribalism among Kenyans in order to give itself something to cure.

This is the full text of my answer to Evan Mwangi as he consulted different Kenyan academics on their views of the problems of Kenyan universities. However, I have made some amendments, including adding some suggestions and responding to some of the observations  in the final version of Prof Mwangi's article.

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​The problem facing Kenyan universities is lack of theory and conviction of leaders, which I find so surprising, given that professors of all people, should have a grasp of the global issues facing education and of what university education is supposed to contribute to society.

​Since I started talking about the new education system in May last year, I have found that discussing the curriculum reforms, and education, is a difficult enterprise. The government's (and KICD's) version of the curriculum is very compelling and seems genuine. However, anyone who is relatively well versed in the neoliberal trends in global education can see what Kenyans imagine the government to be promising is very different from what KICD is actually offering.

 And yet, Kenyans are willing to give the government the benefit of the doubt. In many cases, even people who are sceptical about the Jubilee government or who have previously raised questions about our education system, have surprisingly joined the “let’s give the government a chance” movement. In worse cases, I was accused of intellectual arrogance and asked why I cannot make a trip to Jogoo house and seek audience with the then CS Fred Matiang’i. The tolerance for the reform has caught me by surprise.

What explains this hostility?

In 2009, Dambisa Moyo, a Zambian economist, caught the world by storm with her book Dead Aid, in which she argued that foreign aid does not deliver the development that it promises to Africa.

Dr. Moyo is as mainstream as they come: she was educated at Harvard and Oxford, she speaks impeccable English, does most of her speaking circuit in the West.

And her idea was not new. Africans have questioned foreign aid since independence, because of the strings attached to foreign aid. They have said that our economic dependence on the same people who enslaved and colonized us essentially meant we were not truly independent.

​What was different about Dambisa Moyo?

​After whines about peace and tantrums about illegality from the Jubilee administration, the swearing in of Raila Odinga as the people’s president went ahead without violence.
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The country is not agreed on the impact or significance of the ceremony. For Jubilee supporters, the swearing-in was simply an affront to a legally elected and God-appointed president. For moderates who are keen to take neither side, the swearing in was simply theatrics, and the absence of the major NASA principals, including Kalonzo Musyoka who was supposed to be Odinga’s deputy, is proof that it was a weak move by a fractured coalition. For NASA supporters, it was a validation they needed after humiliation from an uncredible election and from what they consider an illegitimate Muigai presidency.

But for all the idiosyncrasies in the ceremony, I consider the swearing-in to achieved one major element: a challenge to the Jubilee tactic of using fait accomplis for governance.

The single greatest damage of 8-4-4 on the Kenyan psyche is to make us turn an educational structure into the scapegoat for all sorts of problems.
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Education is more than a curriculum and more than how many years one spends in primary, secondary and tertiary schools. Education is also about philosophy (why we teach), sociology (impact of society on education and vice versa), economics (how we fund education and education's economic value), psychology (what education does to our minds and our self-esteem), history (how we have educated over the years), pedagogy (what skills teachers use in the classroom).  Education is all that, and more.