What do you do when you live in a country where the minority are rich but don't work, own the majority of the land, rule the country as a monarch or prime minister despite being unelected, and appoint a mediocre bunch of bureaucrats to run the government?

You become passive aggressive. Or childish. You refuse to directly say what you really think, and attack people who do. You never take responsibility for your position. Instead, you blame the next person for not saying what YOU want to say. Or better still, you offer them a cup of tea and completely evade the topic.  

​This has become the Kenyan character, thanks to very effective lessons from Great Britain. We too are ruled by a royal family which considers Kenya its personal property, maintains power through an election by the minority, and has a government run by bureaucrates who refuse to be held responsible for their actions. To cover up our trauma, we become passive aggressive.

The persistence of the Kenyan politicians in discussing who might win the presidency in 2022 is part of a larger hegemonic tactic of narrowing the Kenyan national consciousness to the future. This narrow national view has been internalized so much by the Kenyan public, that we have developed a vocabulary of abuse against anyone who tries talk about where Kenya has come from and where it is now.

This narrow obsession with the future is not new. During colonial times, we Africans were promised "civilization" if we adopted European cultures, and heaven if we worshipped the European god. After independence, we were promised "development" if we did what IMF and World Bank said.  Today, we are still promised development by the current president on condition that Kenyans refrain from all political discussions.

The tragic loss of eight precious lives in a substandard private school in Ngando this week is a wake up call for Kenyans to completely rethink education. The Ministry of Education, and basically the government, have no clue what they are doing. They are still operating on the logic of the colonial days, where the role of the state is protect investors and leave the Kenyan people to sort out how they will survive. This government’s incompetence has left children, especially the children of the poor, at the mercy of rogue private providers who care more for their profits and little for the safety and education of the children. 

On August 15, 2019, the writers of The XYZ Show invited me to discuss with them the issues of Kenya's new education system. This is the text that I wrote for the occasion in answer to some of the questions the writers asked.

Q. ​Do you see any good in the new education system? What good?

A. I get asked this question a lot. It comes from the way Kenyans have been taught to think in binaries. For every national project, we are expected to talk about the strengths and weaknesses, or the advantages and disadvantages. 

Thank you for inviting me for this forum where you discuss education, a topic that is close to my heart. I wanted to apologize for not being able to join you, until I remembered that I am not able to attend precisely because I am engaged in doing the work of the same education that you have gathered to discuss.
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This conference is memorable for me, because this is the first time in my experience that I have heard of a public conference to discuss education. I would have preferred that the topics of the conference be more easily accessible by the public, topics such as “Why do we educate?” And “what kind of graduates do we want?” Nevertheless, I appreciate this forum and your invitation.

​Unfortunately, the topic you have given me to discuss, that is, education systems that have worked elsewhere, is outside my purview. I came to the public discussion of CBC not as an education expert, but as a teacher who was "tayad" of seeing disempowerment in my students’ faces.

​This statement is to express complete opposition to, and disgust with, the Huduma Bill (2019). No sovereign country that respects the humanity of its people should contemplate translating into law the inhuman ideas that are entrenched in this bill.

The bill is due for public participation today, Wednesday 31 July from 9 am to 1 pm at at the Kenya School of Government, Lower Kabete campus, off Lower Kabete Road. 

The draft bill can be found here, and details on to send views to government can be found here and here.

This is my statement.
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1. MANDATORY STATUS OF HUDUMA NUMBER

a. The stated purpose of the Huduma Bill, which is “to promote efficient delivery of services,” is contradictory, because access to health and education are inalienable human rights, both under the United Nations Charter for Human Rights and under the Bill of Rights in the Constitution of Kenya (2010). Therefore, the respect of these rights cannot be made conditional upon bearing a document of the state. 

After two years of ignoring and avoiding our questions about Kenya's new education system, the bureaucrats behind the new system invaded glitzy media to defend their controversial education system. Their about turn, which looks like it followed advice from a PR consultant, seems to have been sparked by two things.

One, is the goof by freshly appointed Education CS George Magoha, speaking with threatening language to teachers opposing the new system, even with promises to crush the system's opponents. Wilfred Sossion, the secretary-general of the teachers' union KNUT, responded in a hard-hitting statement that included arguments about the colonialism and inequality entrenched by the competency based curriculum. Much as Kenyans seem to equate superman tactics of Matiang'i's stint in education with efficiency, even politicians seemed to agree that Magoha's language had gone too far.