Hon. Richard Nyagaka Tongi

All parliamentary appearances

Entries 151 to 160 of 598.

• 1 Oct 2019 in National Assembly: Thank you, Hon. Temporary Deputy Speaker, for the opportunity to support the Bill. I support it for many reasons. view
• 1 Oct 2019 in National Assembly: Education is holistic. You cannot cherry pick and say that the national Government can do so much and the county governments can do so much. Developed economies in the world have invested a lot more on elementary education than in upper primary education. This is for The electronic version of the Official Hansard Report is for information purposes only. Acertified version of this Report can be obtained from the Hansard Editor. view
• 1 Oct 2019 in National Assembly: the simple reason that science has proven that children who get a good foundation always succeed in education matters as they grow old. If you miss out on the foundation, you will not catch up as you grow up because attitudes are formed at that formative age. If nursery school teachers do it because there is nothing else to do, we would have lost it as a country. We need to see a situation where nursery school teachers are the most qualified people as it is the practice all over the world. In the United States of America (USA) and ... view
• 1 Oct 2019 in National Assembly: However, since we have done a good job using the NG-CDF relatively to county governments, we get proposals in our offices asking us to do classes for the ECD. We appreciate that these are our children who will make schools get their Standard One to Standard Eight graduates. It is out of here that we will have secondary school students. So, we empathise with the situation. At times, we have gone out of our way and allowed them to use classes built by the NG-CDF money, but we know that counties have money. Most of the counties have factored that ... view
• 1 Oct 2019 in National Assembly: Having said that, we all appreciate that education is holistic. We cannot have teachers who are controlled and paid by the county government and others by the national Government. Success of education or the lack of it is a function of many things. It is a function of motivation. If teachers are not motivated, even if you are going to have the nursery school teachers handled by the county government, qualified even to teach in secondary schools, success will not be achieved. Sometimes they are qualified but because of lack of employment, they end up teaching in nursery schools. They ... view
• 1 Oct 2019 in National Assembly: The guiding principle should be qualification. That is one of the amendments that I want to introduce to this Bill. That anomaly is a big omission which is hurting Kenyans not just now, but it will hurt the country even in posterity and days to come. If a demotivated teacher will work just because they have to be paid, we will miss the point. In my county, nursery school teachers are paid a gross of Kshs12,000 totalling to a net of Kshs7,000 after statutory deductions. It will be worse if they have loans. These are the same teachers we expect ... view
• 1 Oct 2019 in National Assembly: As a country, we must deliberate on how we will handle this. It is only fair that, may be, under the Building Bridges Initiative (BBI), this issue is addressed so that we can harmonise the ECD, lower and upper primary, so that there is a seamless transition from one level to the next. We cannot have a bad foundation yet when the child gets to Standard One, there is a huge discrepancy. They get to learn a few things which they should have learnt at nursery school. view
• 1 Oct 2019 in National Assembly: Yes, Hon. Temporary Deputy Speaker. I said the BBI for the simple reason that the mood of the country seems to be talking about it. view
• 1 Oct 2019 in National Assembly: Thank you, Hon. Temporary Deputy Speaker. I am sure BBI has a way of getting issues. I am sure they might have picked this as I speak because they have not done the final copy. I am sure they can input it. It was mentioned in one of the meetings that it is important that we have a holistic education system where we do not have one handled by the county and another by the national Government. The discrepancy sets in and when that happens, chances are that one is going to lose at the expense of the other. view
• 1 Oct 2019 in National Assembly: Unfortunately, we are all strong to the extent of the weakest link that we have. If one link is weak, then all of us are weak to that extent. If our nursery schools are weak, then the whole country will be affected. Our researchers and scientists will be weak. They will be unable to compete at the global level. So, they will be disadvantaged because of poor foundation at the formative stage which is the foundation of education. view