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"id": 772014,
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"content": "Masinde Muliro Report on the murder of JM Kariuki and many other extremely good reports. What was lacking was implementation. As an oversight body, I hope that we will not finish this Motion today and that Sen. Khaniri will find a colleague to amend the Motion to take it back to where it originally was so that we can do a better job. I stand here having gone around this country. I once visited a school in a place called Maikona in Marsabit. The school had Standard One to eight with two teachers; one employed by the TSC, and another recruited locally whose qualifications were not known. I also visited another school near Tukwel Gorge on the edge of Turkana and Pokot counties; a school which had standard one to eight with three teachers; one was from the TSC and two, on interrogation, had no credentials to be teachers. This is replicated in almost every rural school, except perhaps in some areas of the country. The converse is true. If you go to any municipal school, you will find that they are so overstaffed that some female teachers spend half of the day knitting sweaters. This is because there are too many teachers in one school. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, this is the disparity that has informed Sen. Khaniri to bring this Motion. There is a great disparity in the distribution of teachers in schools across the country with major shortages in rural and marginalized areas. For example, in Mandera County we have a lot of teachers from what they call “down country”, in fact, largely from my county, Vihiga and Kakamega. For the information of the House, our counties and my community in particular provides more teachers in this country than any other, perhaps, followed by Kisii County. Every time I go to Turkana I am feted by my colleagues, in fact, there is one young Member of Parliament who told me “ hii kizungu kidogo kidogo unasikiatunazungumza ni ya waluhya ” because our people take great pride in teaching. However, we have seen in Mandera County, where my colleague (Eng.) Mahamud, the ambassador is the Senator, even when they go there to teach, there is no corresponding security to protect them. We have lost many teachers through banditry. Once that happens, the children cannot be relocated and the teachers run away. Those children are left in those schools without teachers. What happens is that at the end of the year, a child from Kipipiri, West Pokot, Maikona, Vanga, and a child from Kilimani Junior Academy have to sit for the same exam. I have been to your county, Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, to those areas with very marginal climate like Marimanti and Karianjai. Children from those areas will sit exams with children from Makini School, Utumishi, Sunshine academies. At the end of the day, they are put on the same level as those from other better areas. They are then called failures while those from better places are called winners. Many of us here, apart from the “young blue band” Senators, went through those ravages. Some of us, like yours truly, first put on a pair of shoes when I went to form five. I went to school walking every day for 30 kilometers, to and from school, from form one to form four. History shows that children from disadvantaged areas do better when they go to those schools. They will not wake up in the morning and refuse to take tea because there is no bread and blue band. For them, having tea is an early Christmas. We must build an egalitarian country where, the place one comes from is not an automatic qualification of The electronic version of the Senate Hansard Report is for information purposes"
}