Endless raids on schools hold up learners' dreams

Baringo, Kenya: Frequent attacks by well-armed cattle raiders on communities living in Baringo South have severely disrupted learning activities. Parents are afraid to send their children to school, teachers are afraid to teach, and schools are now shutting down an alarming rate.

The Ministry of Education and non-governmental organisations have had to withdraw from insecure areas, or are unable to extend their services to areas that desperately need them.

Girls, who have more limited access to education to begin with, and who are typically the first to be pulled out of school because of insecurity, are disproportionately affected.

Conflicts in some parts of Baringo and Pokot counties, said to be mostly between members of the Pokot and Illchamus communities over grazing areas, have paralysed normal activities. The raiders have outsmarted security forces deployed in the area, vandalised homes and set school property on fire as they displaced thousands of people in attempts to expand grazing fields.

This insecurity has seriously retarded, and in certain places even stopped, school-related activities.

Many of the displaced pupils are married, abandoned their studies to participate in their families’ economic and household activities, or have died. Others have opted to join Kenya Police Reservists, hoping to acquire skills to fight the intruders.

No one, including the Government, has comprehensive statistics of the number of schools and other educational institutions operating in the affected areas of Baringo County.

Hundreds unaccounted for

Teachers in Marigat Sub-county have been unable to account for the whereabouts of hundreds of their pupils over the past five years.

At Arabal Primary School, for example, the headteacher, Joel Kiptui, has no idea where 90 pupils that he used to mark in his register have disappeared to in the last three years. He describes this period as the worst for education in the area.

The public institution, which has only six teachers deployed by the Teachers Service Commission (TSC) against a pupil population of 246, suffered a major blow last year after two members of staff were transferred to other counties.

“Teachers are no longer interested in carrying on with their duties here; some are ready to switch careers. Getting new teachers is difficult, and the Government has to move in before things fall apart,” says Kiptui.

Arabal Primary School’s learning activities were suspended last year, and candidates expected to sit the Kenya Certificate of Primary Education (KCPE) exams placed at other examination centres. Learning resumed this year, but activities are yet to go back to normal.

For this reason, this year’s candidates and their parents have improvised a boarding facility where pupils sleep on tattered sacks previously used to deliver relief food.

At dawn, the young learners put their belongings together, hang the bundles on nails on the walls, and then sprinkle the earthen floors with cold water fetched from a nearby seasonal river.

Ill-equipped

These errands are not free of danger. Two of their schoolmates were ambushed and shot by raiders as they descended the rocky hill to fetch water last year. The pair sustained serious wounds and relocated with their parents across Laikipia Hills.

The rest of the students now study under the watchful eye of the ill-equipped Kenya Police Reservists.

“Parents support the school by paying Sh100 weekly. The money is used to buy food. The children go to the river to wash their clothes and bathe,” narrates Kiptoo Kimosop, the Mukutani Ward administrator.

Arabal Location has four primary schools, but one, Ngelecha, was closed after it was razed to the ground. At Arabal Primary School alone, 20 pupils have been orphaned as a result of the conflict. Others have dropped out of school and been employed in the shopping centres or the expansive Perkera Irrigation Scheme.

Some families have opted to relocate and establish homes in Laikipia, Mogotio and Marigat Town.

Between 2005 and June this year, Mukutani Division Assistant Education Officer David Lenoi Lechamagany says more than 15 classrooms, as well as administration blocks, books stores and toilets were destroyed by attackers at Noosukuro and Rugus primary schools.

This has forced an entire locational population of close to 20,000 people to seek refuge elsewhere.

Noosukuro Primary School, which had six permanent classrooms, is but an empty shell. Faded words on  dilapidated blackboard are the only reminders that this was once a school.

The head teacher, who is temporarily teaching at Kiserian Primary School, says the destruction followed the expulsion of residents from their villages in September, last year, up to April, this year.

Even where schools continue to operate, students may not attend classes after a threat or an attack. Each incident affects the risk assessment that parents and students undertake nearly daily.

Single episodes, even from far away locations, accumulate to establish a pattern. In a community as traumatised by violence as Illchamus, teachers, parents, and students are keenly attuned to fluctuations in this pattern and decide to continue or stop their education based on how they view the general climate of insecurity and how it will manifest itself in their immediate environment.

 

“The closure of a school is bound to have a ripple effect, so that many other schools close around one affected school for no particular reason except that the school was targeted. When it reopens, fewer girls come back.

“This ripple effect magnifies the gravity of each attack and raises fears elsewhere,” Jeremiah Nakuret, the head teacher of Noosukuro Primary School, explains.

“Learning here was suspended in 2006 because of constant threats by criminals. Teachers and pupils had to be split and re-distributed to other schools, away from war-torn areas.”

The Government had pumped in more than Sh10 million into school reconstruction when the late George Saitoti was the Education minister. More than 120 children registered in the first month after Noosukuro reopened its doors.

“The Government often refers to these attackers as mere cattle raiders, but why are they destroying learning institutions and killing innocent children?” poses Nakuret.

About 300 metres from the school stand the remains of a structure that once housed the Administration Police offices. The structure was brought down by the invaders, but not before raiding the armoury. Government structures worth Sh3.4 million, according to former councilor Stephen ole Kwaro, were destroyed in a day as the occupants of the police post fled.

Killer gangs

Baringo Governor Benjamin Cheboi says the eight  officers stationed there had no option but to run for their lives.

Roads meant to connect the area to the outside world are now manned by hundreds, if not thousands, of fighters roaming the area from sunrise to sunset.

Other affected schools are Lekiricha, Longicharo, Paratalo, Ramacha, Ngelecha, Murat and Kapindasum. Also targeted were Rugus chief’s offices, the Kiserian AP camp, and boreholes at Rugus, Partalo and Garma.

“Wanton destruction of public institutions is a clear indicator that they will resist any attempts of the former inhabitants to return. Young children have escaped with life-threatening gun wounds but nobody seems to care,” says Lechamagany.

The killer gangs, apart from seriously injuring several pupils and killing some, attacked and injured former Makutani headmaster Joshua Lekoton while on his way back from school a year ago.

Lechamagany says approximately 1,000 pupils have dropped out of school since 2005.

Tired of seeing innocent souls lost and property destroyed, villagers and their leaders are demanding a permanent solution from a  government they say has failed them.

“They swept through villages, maimed and killed at will because the Government sat on the fence. The community must be compensated and helped to reclaim their lives,” says Mukutani Member of County Assembly Renson Barkei.

Hundreds of locals are camping around Kiserian General Service Unit camp.

Geoffrey Lengusuranga is among the survivors who left all their possessions when a gang drove away their cattle in 2005. He now relies on casual jobs and handouts to put food on the table.

Seventy-year-old Kibaricho Lecharus says her son died when five huts were burnt down in her compound at Rugus Village in 2006. She says some displaced women are engaging in immorality to make ends meet.

Recently, at an emotional peace forum under the theme Tudumishe Amani Watoto Wetu Wasome, funded by the European Union through the National Drought Management Authority, pupils from East Pokot, North and South Baringo sub-counties, through songs, poems and public speaking, pleaded with adults to end the conflicts.

Curiously, all the MPs from the affected regions skipped the event, even though its organisers said the leaders had been formally invited.

While delivering a speech on behalf of Governor Cheboi, the chief executive in charge of education, Emily Chebet asked the central government to consider constructing police posts around all public schools in the area to avoid further exodus of learners.

Baringo County Commissioner Peter Okwanyo said those carrying out the attacks were a  few criminal elements and no community should be blamed for the violence.