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"id": 185141,
"url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/185141/?format=api",
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"type": "speech",
"speaker_name": "Dr. Mwiria",
"speaker_title": "The Assistant Minister for Higher Education, Science and Technology",
"speaker": {
"id": 190,
"legal_name": "Valerian Kilemi Mwiria",
"slug": "kilemi-mwiria"
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"content": " Thank you, Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, for giving me an opportunity to contribute. Like those who have spoken before me, I would like to congratulate the Minister for Education and his staff for doing a very good job under very difficult circumstances. This is a Ministry that I think takes care of more employees than most ministries put together in this country. There have been major crises. I think it has been tough but they have handled them very professionally. I would also want to commend the Minister for being very fair in the way business is done at that Ministry with regard to recruitment of teachers, allocation of bursary resources and many other things that we have seen during the last Parliament. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, the Ministry has had to address major challenges recently like the school strikes, issues of holiday tuition, the Kenya National Examinations Council (KNEC), cheating and so on and so forth. Often, we go to the Ministry as a solution to all these problems. Often, we forget that the biggest solution will actually lie outside of the Ministry. That our students are behaving just like they see us behave. The reason there is so much drug abuse, violence, tribalism and even incidents of corruption and mismanagement in our schools is because that is what our young people see everywhere. So, it is not enough to just say that we have to introduce a curriculum in peace education. This is okay and it is good for the consultants who got that. That will get us nowhere as long as we have many leaders in this Parliament and Government who are tribalists. 2590 PARLIAMENTARY DEBATES October 8, 2008 Unless we solve that by getting them to preach peace and national unity, it does not help how much we tell our students. It is not enough to talk about teaching morality, discipline and so on if whatever our kids see outside school is immorality all over the place. So, it is important for us to realise that a solution can lie beyond the Ministry and that as Members of Parliament, we have a major responsibility because we are the ones elected by the people. We are the ones out there to talk to parents, religious leaders, but more importantly, to lead by example when it comes to issues of corruption, immorality, tribalism and so on. Unless we solve that, then we might as well forget it. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, the issue of education, as somebody said, is so important because it gives all of us hope. It is the only hope. I think many of the people in this Parliament and those who made it before, should give thanks to education given the kinds of backgrounds that they came from. So, it is important that we continue to give, as many Kenyans as possible, hope and that hope is not going to be believed. We are going to continue to be living a lie if we are going to tell young people that because they have free primary and secondary education, then they can achieve the best in this country. We need to pay particular attention to the majority of the schools where our young people are going to. Our public schools, in spite of the heavy investments by the Ministry, continue to be disadvantaged because our system is very elitist in terms of selection. This is so that although we give an opportunity to hundreds and thousands of young people at the primary school level and even day secondary schools and so on, we have a situation where we have so many calls but few are chosen, like they say in the Bible. Few are chosen to enter the best schools, degree programmes and even join university. So, therefore, we need to go beyond that and see what best we can do to ensure that we go back to the situation of the 1960s and 1970s when, indeed, the majority of those who went to the best institutions and universities came from schools that represented the majority in terms of the numbers of the students that were in them. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, equipping is okay and the Ministry has to be recommended for supporting schools that are specially disadvantaged especially in arid and semi- arid areas. But we have to look at the selection criteria or system that determines who goes to secondary school, university and to do what. I say that because I think somebody spoke about a scandalous situation in terms of employment and so on. For me, the greatest scandal in this country is a situation whereby the majority of the kids or 70 to 80 per cent of the students who come out of 10 per cent of the institutions end up taking the best places. It is about resource and grades but I think we need to find out a more regular way of evaluating who proceeds from one grade to another. It is okay to go to Mars but that is a simple way of doing it. You get grades like \"As\", \"B pluses\" and so on. That is all. So, we need to have other criteria. Are we able to measure other traits? If you are good in drama, sports and so on, is that considered when it comes to your going to university? In terms of discipline, how come that we have a lot of indisciplined kids making it and the problem of indiscipline is in our institutions? It is because we do not consider that as an important criteria in terms of judging the kind of students that we want to proceed from one level to the other. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, we also need to ask questions like: If you are admitting to university, is it really fair to compare a student for a medical degree who came from a day school to one from Alliance or Mangu High School? At this rate, are some district schools and day schools ever going to have engineers, doctors and architects? If that is not possible and we know those are the areas that are rewarding, what kind of criteria can we come up with that is much more original and that looks at the kind of school that you came from combined with your grades, gender and region of the country? In other words, we are telling the Ministries of Education as well as the one of Higher Education, Science and Technology to begin to think of more original criteria for determining the students who go to the best secondary schools and universities and especially to October 8, 2008 PARLIAMENTARY DEBATES 2591 do specific degree programmes. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, I would also like to speak on the matter of supervision. I begin by congratulating the Ministry for doing a great deal to recruit more supervisors, quality assurance people, District Education Officers and so on. I call upon the Ministry to also ensure that as we create new educational districts, we provide them with enough resources so that they are well placed to be able to compete with the more established districts. I know it is a challenge. It is a matter of resources but I think we need to do much to ensure that even at that level, we can support competition. There is also the issue of delocalisation. I think it is high time we went back to the old days when a principal of a school did not have to come from the same constituency or districts where they were born. The people who managed schools really well in the 1960s and 1970s were actually missionaries. They came from Europe, America and all sorts of places and maybe it is because they were detached from the local environment that they did not have many more interests other than to be real missionaries of our institutions. If civil servants can be posted anywhere in this country, why is it so difficult to rotate our school principals to be able to manage schools anywhere in this country as long as the positions they are given are commensurate with their positions? Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, this should also apply to teacher recruitment. I know the system of teacher recruitment is locally based and that is good because it targets those areas that have been disadvantaged in terms of the number of teachers in those particular locations. However, is it possible to combine both a system that looks at the disadvantaged districts and constituencies with a system whereby where you are recruited has no bearing and does not mean you will be posted in the same area so that we can recruit from areas that are disadvantaged? This is because maybe they did not have enough teachers recruited but do we have to send them back to the same locations where they are recruited? So, let us recruit from those remote areas but let us send them across the country and I believe delocalisation will be seriously addressing the issue of tribal clashes in this country. If we had primary school teachers teaching in parts of the country where they were not born and school principals managing schools wherever they are and university vice-chancellors, then such problems cannot arise. It is a terrible situation because university chancellors also tend to come from the areas where the universities are allocated. If we have that, then I think Kenyans would be much more conscious in terms of beginning to attack members of other communities because their role would be all over the country. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, I agree that we should take the issue of teacher remuneration seriously. I think we should reward them although we should be aware that more than 80 per cent of our budget goes to teachers' salaries. If we do that, then we are going to convince our teachers to spend more time in our public schools because many of these teachers are also spending a lot of their time in academies doing private tuition and so on. If the teachers are going to be paid more, we need to request them to also spend more time in their schools. I know they are supervisors sponsored by the Ministry but there are many schools in this country where teachers report way after 9 a.m. and depart from school before 3.00 p.m and also where heads of schools who do not come from the areas where the schools are located report on a Monday or Tuesday and go away on a Thursday. I have a particular problem with the District Education Officers (DEOs) in my home area. They show up on Tuesdays and by Thursdays, they are headed home because they do not come from that location. I think we need to be more stringent on that. As much as we are recruiting many of these supervisors, we need to do enough to make sure that they are, indeed, spending as much time as they are paid for in the institutions that they are posted. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, if we address the issue of selection criteria and it becomes evident that you can come from a public school, go to a national school and then 2592 PARLIAMENTARY DEBATES October 8, 2008 university, we will begin to have faith in our own public institutions. So, actually, in the long-term, we will have many more schools that our parents want to take their children to, so that we can reduce the pressure on Alliance, Mang'u and other national schools. With those few remarks, I beg to support."
}