Why our efforts towards real education in Kenya have utterly failed

The number of Kenya’s universities grows like Hydra’s heads.

From only one at independence, it has surged, a mere 60 years later, to hundreds. Every year, thousands of our youngsters reportedly graduate.

But the question is ineluctable: To what avail? That, precisely, was the embarrassing point with which an education financier called World Bank confronted our ministry of Education this week.

No, you cannot expect such a bank – the nerve centre of the corporate Western octopus – to put it any other way.

Nevertheless, the question remains stark. Why do Kenya’s parents persist in paying through the nose to take their children through an education channel which, they know increasingly well, will never give those children any quality knowledge, any effectively functional skill?

How do I know this? From the bank itself. Every year, it produces and distributes a report which depicts the Third World’s governments, especially Africa’s, as ceaselessly clamouring for “aid” and “loan” money – veritable Mount Kilimanjaros of it – from the bank to be channelled into insatiable Hoover machines called “classrooms” which, in return, churn out nothing but moral and intellectual Lilliputians, hundreds of thousands of them, every year.

GRABBING AND GORMANDIZING
Every year that passes, from the kindergarten through the primary and the secondary to the tertiary, what our institutions of alleged moral and intellectual upbringing actually bring out is a deadly deal of moral dung and intellectual quasimodos.

The question is: To what do we owe the sustained grabbing and gormandizing which are bringing down all of Kenya’s pillars of governance and peace?

Open any newspaper page and your nose will be immediately assaulted with the smelliest words from our allegedly educated class, all the way from the national capital to the headquarters of new governance units called counties, where everybody, from the governor to the humblest member of the assembly, struts like a peacock, consumes like a maggot and speaks only an incomprehensible dialect of “development”.

The self-styled “donor community” – the official Western society – knows it full well. It has every detail about how practically all the money that it disburses in the form of “aid” or “loan” goes directly into the pockets and bank accounts (including in Switzerland) of our nabobs.

So why does the official West persist in this international charade? For the same guilty-minded reason that Nairobi’s nouveaux riches persist in pushing a few filthy coins into the hands of street beggars.

OPTIMUM INVESTMENTS

In the two forms of begging – both from the Gnomes of Zurich and from Kenya’s national and “devolved” officials – it is what can keep quiet both kinds of “aid” recipients during important political controversies.

And when it comes to voting, both at home and at the UN and other international forums, it is what can ensure that the hoi polloi vote only for the maggots and chrysalises.

That is the only thing that can explain the apparent refusal by official Kenya ever since independence to inject genuine social knowledge and quality learning into our classrooms.

If our classrooms continue to produce only tribe-racked minds, our voters will continue to fill our local and national offices with hard-hearted tribal bigots, thieves and male chauvinists, and our political parties will continue in the hands of ethnic pinheads.

This is why the corporate West can exploit it so easily. The community’s money goes into causes that can only intensify and dredge ethnic contradictions and prevent national rapport of the kind that we need to fight and defeat all the stratagems which the former colonial powers continue to deploy to thwart our national unity and prevent us from making optimum investments in revolutionising our economy, intellect and morality.

If, despite the swelling number of our universities, we cannot rely on the classroom to lead us in our fight to eliminate ethnic small-mindedness, only one conclusion is possible: All our efforts at real education have utterly failed.