Counties able to develop Early Childhood syllabus, Governor says

KWALE COUNTY: Governor Salim Mvurya has said county governments are able to provide pre-primary school syllabuses contrary to arguments by the Teachers Service Commission (TSC).

Mr Mvurya, who is the Council of Governors vice chairperson, said county governments have the capacity to develop the syllabus because counties have a pool of professionals.

“County governments are not local authorities and remember, only governors among the elected leaders were required to have a university degree before vying. It therefore beats logic when we are told that we cannot employ Early Childhood Development Education (ECDE) teachers because we can’t develop our own syllabus yet we have so many professionals,” said Mvurya.

He argued that by employing the ECDE teachers, most marginalised counties like Kwale will see the benefits of devolution by having a chance to solve their own problems.

Mvurya also told other county stakeholders not to be bystanders by reducing devolution to be a “governor’s-only affair”.

“We want to integrate ECDE into devolution and don’t want a situation where someone in Jogoo House will decide the number of teachers a county will have,” he added. GHRC Executive Director Caleb Ngw’ena called on the police to release the forensic findings of the investigations into the killings of clerics in the recent past, saying “this will clear the air over claims that some licensed gun holders were hiring out the weapons to commit crime.”