July, the most difficult month of the school year, is here with us again. Students in some parts of the country are dealing with cold temperatures in dorm rooms that are crowded, and with rules against wearing extra layers to keep warm.

​July is also the month of mock exams, when students are reminded that their future, and the pride (or shame) of their communities,  all depend on the grades they score during the examination.

The drilling for exams is also accompanied by physical and psychological abuse. Young people are told that they are useless without passing the examinations, and they are aware that even for the few who do pass exams, their future is not guaranteed. Corruption is going through the roof, and unemployment is destroying the self esteem and livelihoods of young people.

​But all these stories are missing from the hegemonic narrative about the spate of school fires that have returned in this strike season. The government, mainstream media, the church and educators are all reading from the same page in turning Kenyan society against her youth.

The naming of culprits behind the recent spectacular corruption scandals like the second edition of the NYS heist, and the scandal du jour, the importation of toxic sugar, is deeply frustrating. Kenyans are being treated to spectacles of fighting against corruption, but in reality, nothing is really changing. All we Kenyans are doing is participating in a blood sport, reminiscent of the Roman Empire, where people have a space to vent their anger and violence, but return to the same oppressive state of affairs.

​The blood sports, whose visibility has been maintained in Western civilization today through Hollywood films and video games on gladiators, were a cathartic spectacle that sustained the Roman empire. Because Rome inevitably used brutal war to capture every area that it added to the empire, violence necessarily became the lifeblood of Rome.  But also, as various ethnicities, nationalities and classes were brought together, blood sports in the stadiums became one way to keep the empire united through gross displays of valor and power. Gladiators, slaves, prisoners, Christians and wild exotic animals were subjected to torture and excruciating death for the entertainment of the crowds. Scholars say that the games provided an outlet for citizens to express increasingly violent aggression while the state contained the violence within the walls of the colosseum.

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?