Pity the nation that allows corruption to thrive in its schools. Pity the victims of this practice.
That public schools have financial challenges is not a secret. That there are corrupt activities taking place in some public and private schools is the worst kept secret.
For how long will this situation obtain? Have the parents individually and through their association given up on fighting corruption in these schools? Are chairpersons of the parents associations co-opted into partaking the goodies on the gravy train? What about the government through audit, quality assurance, anti-corruption and police detectives? Why are they silent on these matters? Are the anti-corruption and Directorate of Criminal Investigations officials not parents in these schools? What is the role of the Boards of Management (BoM) in fighting or abetting these corrupt activities?
Consider the following activities. One, there is occasional need to have additional teaching of below average students in an attempt to raise their performance. The programmes may be called tuition or remedial teaching. In the time of old the teachers would carry out this duty as part of their mandate. But now parents have to pay money to the teachers through an elaborate system that is not documented in school accounts.
Two, parents are charged for prizes that are given to the best performing students. Thirdly, there is a charge on what is known as “teacher motivation”. Schools struggle to outdo each other on providing snacks at break times, lunches and occasionally supper to teachers teaching at night. Furthermore, they have to be funded by parents to travel to places like Kisumu, Mombasa, Kampala, Kigale, Dar es Salaam or even the Cape Town or Dubai in the name of teacher motivation.
A question arises as to why they need to be motivated when they trained, qualified and struggled to get employed if they were not motivated to be teachers.
Three, there have also been disturbing allegations that seem to be credible of principals being paid for marginally qualified last minute admission of students. There is information in Nakuru about a big public primary school that the principal instructs the class teachers to collect ten thousand shillings per month per class. It is upon the class teachers to create a reason or excuse to charge parents to raise these amounts.
Consider the activities of the government as well. When the ministry started providing text books to schools about twenty years ago, the ministry would wire the funds for purchase of these books to school bank accounts. The principals, with the assistance of the BoM and the teacher, would then purchase the books on a need basis from the nearest bookshops.
A lot of bookshops sprung up in small towns that served these schools well. About ten years ago, this procedure was changed and books were procured centrally at the ministry. It has led to a situation in which occasionally excess books are supplied, books for subjects offered in schools are either not supplied or are insufficient among other challenges. Above all most of the small bookshops owned by the “hustlers” collapsed because there was no business to do.
The principals, the BoM and parents watch these activities and exchange “knowing glances” because of the monumental wastage that the government is deliberately presiding over. One would have thought that this government would revert to the former procedure to promote efficiency, cost effectiveness and salvage the “hustlers”. This has not happened and nobody is talking about it.
In the construction of classrooms, the ministry has given very high standards of quality of work needed – mainly construction with very expensive materials including terrazzo floors. Then the involvement of officials of the Ministry of Public Works as project supervisors and clerks of works not only causes delays because of staff shortages but also increases costs due to supervisory expenses involved, however noble the intention is. Many schools that put up infrastructural projects using BoM-generated funds tend to be completed at much lower costs than those prescribed by the ministry.
The ministry has consistently maintained that the centralization of funding and supply of books to schools was being done to avoid theft in schools. This same flimsy reason is now being bandied around to collect school levies through the e-citizen platform. How will the e-citizen platform detect what parents are paying to class teachers for motivation and tuition? How will it detect that in some cases principals and their proxies are the suppliers of school uniforms and mattresses when these payments will not be paid through this platform?
So is the situation in schools hopeless? The answer is no. The ministry officials have progressively underfunded the audit and quality assurance services. If auditors were to be deployed and strictly monitored as they carry out their mandates, the majority of the problems raised above would be minimized.
One would have thought that every set of new top officials – the CSs and the PSs – would strive to solve these challenges. There does not seen to be any resolve nor intention to do so even with the current office holders. It is very unfortunate, unexpected and calamitous. The parents and students are on their own.
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