Professor who never went to high school

Thousands of last year’s KCSE examination candidates quietly watched from the sidelines as their A-grade colleagues celebrated good results with song and dance on Tuesday. They scored average grades, but will this be the end of the road for them? Is there hope that these youngsters will one day be great men and women despite scoring average, or even poor grades?

Can a person who never set foot in a secondary school make it in life? Can a person who sat his secondary school examinations as a private candidate ever rise to the top? To find the answer to this question, one needs to look no further than the embattled permanent secretary in the Ministry of Education, Prof Karega Mutahi.

The professor, who says his greatest weakness is impatience, never set foot in a secondary school classroom. He does not know his fate over the free education funds scandal, but he knows he has come a long way. After struggling through primary school, where at one point he was forced to repeat classes, young Karega registered for Form Four examinations as a private candidate, scoring a Division Two, the equivalent of grade B-minus in the 8-4-4 system.

Untrained teacher

The Saturday Nation had a one-on-one interview with Prof Mutahi, whose profile sends a message of hope to young Kenyans so often dismissed as average performers. Starting out as an untrained primary school teacher after his primary education, he rose through the ranks to become the chief executive of the ministry with the biggest budgetary allocation.

Extreme poverty and an absentee father saw him miss out on his secondary school. “I never went to any high school. In fact, in primary school, I had to repeat Class Eight,” confessed the embattled PS. He sat his Certificate of Primary Education in 1963 and scored an A in English, a B in mathematics, and a D in general paper.

He had no hope of ever going to secondary school, so he went to look for a job. Using his CPE certificate, he worked for one year as an untrained teacher at Kiru Primary School in Murang’a District. His lucky break came when Kigari Teachers Training College started offering basic teaching skills to promising Class Eight leavers, which saw him enrol for the lowest cadre of training.

While at Kigari, he enrolled for the Kenya English Test, which allowed him to sit the Kenya Junior Secondary Examination (KJSE), then administered at Form Two level. He was then a teacher in Thika. He passed KJSE and proceeded to enrol for his O-level examinations in 1967.

He scored a Second Division, then again enrolled for A-level examinations in 1968, which he also passed with one principle and two subsidiaries. He then sat for the mature age entrance examination, then administered by the University of East Africa, and passed, allowing him to gain admission to the University of Nairobi in 1973.

He studied for a Bachelor of Arts in linguistics and political science. Determined to scale all obstacles, he now holds a Master of Arts in linguistics from the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) and a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in linguistics from the University of Nairobi, which he was awarded in 1978.

The boy from Murang’a, who never stepped into a secondary school classroom, has headed five other ministries besides the Ministry of Education. He has been head of the ministries of Agriculture, Livestock Development and Marketing, Office of the Vice President, and Planning and National Development. Others are Research, Technical Training and Applied Technology, and Reclamation and Development of Arid, Semi-Arid and Wastelands.

Always the scholar, he also has 19 publications to his name, not to mention 29 conference papers, a long line of local and international awards, including the Order of the Chief of Burning Spear. His other awards are the University of California’s Exchange Programme Award, Nuffield Visiting Scholar Award from the University of York, the DAAD Visiting Scholar Award from the University of Cologne, Germany, and the Elder of The Order of The Burning Spear (EBS).

Another example of an average performer who is on the way to the top is Dr John Kihoro, a mathematics lecturer at Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology. His name, too, was not anywhere in the newspapers when the 1989 KCSE results were announced.

This was because he scored a mean grade of B-minus in a small ill-equipped day school that residents of his home area of Othaya, Nyeri, regarded as a dumping ground for boys and girls who were not bright enough to join the more prestigious national and provincial schools.

 “It did not even have a laboratory. We had to walk to the nearest “big school” to see a microscope for the first time. Villagers used to crack crude jokes about our school. They regarded us as failures,” recounts Dr Kihoro. He barely escaped the vicious cycle of failure that many average performers in KCPE and KCSE fall into.

“They score average grades in KCPE and KCSE, or  drop out before the examinations mostly due to lack of  school fees, get into child labour, start experimenting with drugs and alcohol before slowly edging into crime.

“I would have been a crime statistic in Central Province if a complete stranger had not intervened to get me back to school,” says Dr Kihoro. He scraped through eight years of primary school, scoring 49 points out of 72 in 1985. This translates to around 360 out of the total 600 marks.

And after only two terms in the village day secondary school, the school fees taps ran dry and young Kihoro found himself out of class, doing manual jobs at the nearby trading centre. After spending months out of school, Kihoro got a small break, through a Japanese volunteer teacher in the school — Takanobu Kuroda, of the Japanese International Cooperation Agency (JICA).

The volunteer mathematics teacher noticed that one of his students had quietly disappeared from school for a large part of the third term and rode his motorbike to young Kihoro’s poverty-ravaged homestead to find out why he was not attending class. And in stuttering Kiswahili, which his young student interpreted to his parents, the stranger offered to clear the school fees balance on one condition: that the boy abandon his casual jobs and went back to class the following day.

Still, it was not easy catching up with the rest of his classmates, but Kihoro managed a mean grade of B-minus in the “school for fools.” And as his classmates were admitted to such high-rated degree courses as medicine and law, Kihoro was admitted to Kenyatta University for the less prestigious Bachelor of Science degree.

Not one to give up, he proceeded to earn a first class honours degree before proceeding for a doctorate in mathematics at the Jomo Kenyatta University of Technology. It is now 20 years since Dr Kihoro received his “average” KCSE results and the mathematics lecturer is another living testimony that average performers can rise to the top.