School fires a wake-up call to address decay in public culture

The torching of more than 120 schools in Kenya signals the return of violent student protests to haunt Africa’s education sector. In April, violent protests over electricity and water shortages led to the closure of the University of Ibadan, Nigeria’s oldest, and in South Africa students started the academic year by marching on Parliament in Cape Town.

Certainly, Africa is not new to student activism. Students were at the forefront of independence movements in the 20th century and the pro-democracy campaigns of the 1980s and early 1990s. But with few exceptions, the sensible or emancipatory militancy of the past is giving way to a new genre of senseless violence in the 21st century.

The jury is still out as to what is driving this genre of senseless violence. The culprit is a new get-rich-quickly-and-at-all-costs African middle class, which is rapidly becoming a double-edged blade that is cutting both ways.

Defined by the African Development Bank as a stratum of society able to spend the equivalent of $2 to $20 a day or more, Africa’s emergent middle class, the fastest-growing in the world, has been praised by the American investor and philanthropist, George Soros, as “one of the few bright spots on the gloomy global economic horizon”.

A legitimate child of globalisation and decades of sustained growth of African economies, this class is expected to grow from 34 per cent currently to 42 per cent of Africa’s projected population of 1.1 billion spurred by the continent’s imminent boom in consumer spending, estimated to reach $1.4 trillion by 2020.

Admittedly, the rise of the middle class has spurred the rapid expansion of the education sector in recent decades. But its unbridled liberal capitalist ethos, negative competition and corruption are intensely corrupting the public sphere as an arena of shared values, behaviour and symbols that defined and sustain our social fabric. As the political philosopher, Hannah Arendt, rightly noted, public culture is pivotal in realising the common good of the people.

The eruption of violent protests by students and teachers in countries like Nigeria may be attributed to loss of oil revenues, leading to shortages and increase in education fees.

But Kenya’s story is one of a middle class gone amok, trying to elevate “cheating” in national examinations into a right and using the tactic of burning schools as a way of enforcing the “right”.

The use of violent tactics by sections of the Kenyan middle class is not an isolated case. Since April 2016, teachers in Mexico have been sealing off highways and creating artificial food shortages as a tactic to prevent President Enrique Peña Nieto’s government from fixing an education system blamed for 55 per cent of the country’s 15-year-olds lacking basic proficiency in mathematics.

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The storyline of the school fires and their consequences is now familiar. The motive of the arsonists is also becoming clear: To force the government to suspend a slew of education reforms the Minister for Education unveiled in May to curb cheating in national examinations, which forced authorities to nullify more than 7,000 primary and secondary school examination results last year. These reforms include changing the school calendar, cutting the typical one-month holiday in August to just two weeks, limiting social events, including prayer days and parent visits to reduce the contacts between students and outsiders who take payments to send them exam questions and answers via mobile phones. The endgame is to prevent the national examination from being leaked before testing begins in October.

The web of actors and forces at play in the school fires may be wider than it was previously thought. At least five categories of players share in the grievances that are now driving the burning of schools.

First are those students who are angry that they are unable to access national examination papers in advance of their exams. Some of the more than 45 students charged with arson in court told police investigators that they were protesting because they had paid for the examination papers, but were unable to receive them.

Obviously, the school fires are not spontaneous but pre-planned. A confidential report linked to the police and the Education Ministry indicates that the fires, which mainly affect classrooms and dormitories, “appear well-coordinated”.

In practically all the cases, students appear to have had prior knowledge of attacks, enabling them to escape well in advance. As a result, and in contrast to past incidents where school fires claimed hundreds of casualties, the recent fires have caused minor injuries and no deaths.

Second are parents, mainly middle class, who are part of the cabals that buy and smuggle examination papers to their children in schools. These parents are corrupting the social fabric and nurturing a generation of citizens with a deep sense of entitlement and no respect for the value of hard work and fair-play in society as symbols and victims of a corrupted public culture.

Third are the teachers who have to work for an extra two weeks. Not surprisingly, a number of teachers have been charged in court alongside their students with torching schools. Following random visits to several schools, where Dr Matiang’i found that in some schools teachers were absent without permission, the Ministry of Education justifiably feels that students are hell-bent on cheating in examintions because they are not being properly taught.

The fires are also seen as acts of retribution from “cartels” linked to the exam-setting body, which used to profit by charging for advance copies of questions on the test.

Teachers and students have a strong ally in the Kenya National Union of Teachers. Once hailed for their emancipatory role in society, trade unions are now everywhere derailing education reforms. Mexico’s militant union, the National Co-ordinator of Education Workers, has been sponsoring the teachers’ blockades because education reforms put its own influence and interests at stake. In an interview with CNN, Knut Secretary-General Wilson Sossion blamed the school fires on “the sudden change of programmes,” calling upon the government “to close schools for a period so that we can ease the tension.”

The students’ protests are a wake-up call to firmly address the decay in the public culture. It is time to consider re-introducing a compulsory youth service programme to nurture and mentor the youth and inculcate shared national values.

Prof Peter Kagwanja is the chief executive of the Africa Policy Institute.