Just around the time that the political class has proposed radical distortions of culture in the BBI report, the Commission of University Education has proposed amendments to the universities act that would allow the president to start a university on his or her own pet projects, known as the "specialized degree awarding institution."

Other amendments in the proposed act hijack the creative innovations of universities by embedding them in law, and extend the reach of the Commission in processes that should ideally be approved by university councils.

These amendments were published on 24th November 2019 in an announcement about the launch of the approval presided by the Education CS, Prof Magoha, that was held two days later. The event was not covered by any of the mainstream media, and even the Commission itself has limited its reporting on the event to a facebook post. It is clear that the government wants to shield education reforms from public debate, with eyewitness accounts saying that at the meeting, Magoha threatened the "stakeholders" present with standard national exams  for all universities if the universities opposed the amendments.

It is important to note that these amendments come in addition to several other gestures from the Ministry of Education to limit education, culture and thinking in Kenya, including the recent replacement of the education system in primary and high schools, the crushing of the teachers' union KNUT by their government employer, the Teachers' Service Commission.

Below is my citizen's response which I sent to the Commission, and I invite Kenyans to send their reflections to the Commission of University Education. Kenyans who may not want to get bogged down by technical details may copy paste and send this post, or if write a simple message asking the Commission to subject the amendments to public debate as required by the constitution. The email is info@cue.or.ke. 

It is now fairly well accepted in public discourse outside Kikuyu-land that the rates of alcoholism and suicide among Kikuyu men are related to the soul pact which the Kikuyu community have signed since 1969 to keep the Kenyattas in power. It is a phenomenon that brings a lot of bitterness in the rest of the country, especially in the communities that have most recently suffered large scale state violence, such as that was witnessed in Kibra and Kisumu in 2017 as Kenyans protested the rigged election of Muigai Kenyatta.
 
The extremely slow realization that the Kikuyu are getting isolated from the rest of Kenya has started to produce a literature in which it is explained that the Kikuyu have acknowledged the mistake they made in supporting Muigai in 2017.

On September 23, Kenyans began their week with sad news that six children had lost their lives at Precious Talents, a private school in the low-income neighborhood of Ngando, Nairobi, following the collapse of one of the school’s poorly constructed buildings. Our belligerent CS Prof George Magoha rushed to the scene, and after inspecting reading a written statement, he fielded questions from the press.

​In response to the first question about the provision of education for children from poor neighborhoods, the CS hinted that the children had died because the parents had chosen not to take their children to the public schools in the area. He said: “It comes to a matter of choice for parents. I am duly advised that the nearest public primary school from here is only two kilometers away. But then we are a democratic country and the role of the government must be restricted to ensuring that the... public primary schools available are safe enough.”

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.