Bulgaria trip: Genesis of Kenya's first scholarship scam

Bulgaria offered a fully paid government scholarship for 96 young Kenyans in 1963. [iStockphoto]

Tears of poverty-stricken parents desperate to rescue their miserable children stranded in  Europe and America are too grim to bear.

For months now desperate pleas of hundreds of parents in Eldoret to the government to assist them get the monies they had contributed for the dubious education scholarship in Finland and Canada have fallen on deaf ears.

The plight of about 150 students from Uasin Gishu who contributed money in the hope of getting education scholarships only for some of them to find themselves homeless and jobless in a strange land brings back memories of Kenya’s first-ever scholarship scam in 1963.

As soon as the Union Jack was lowered and Kenya was declared free, some communist countries flocked into the country with bags of goodies in a bid to lure the young country to their bloc.

Bulgaria was magnanimous enough to offer a fully paid government scholarship for 96 young Kenyans. Kenya consequently selected the students who would benefit from this programme and took them through rigorous training so that they could be the country’s ambassadors abroad.

On the appointed day, the Bulgarian government dispatched a plane that was to transport the students. Eager not to disappoint, Davidson Ngini, the officer in charge of Higher Education in the Ministry of Education ensured that the students were at the airport by 5.30am so that they could depart at exactly 7.30am.

Thirty minutes before the departure time, the students were checked in and excitedly sat in the departure lounge, from where they watched the plane that was to fly them into their dreamland being readied for the flight.

“However just about 7.30am,  three buses full of people were seen driven to the Bulgarian aircraft. They stopped, the passengers alighted and hurriedly boarded the aircraft,” Kenneth Matiba, who was the Education Permanent Secretary (PS) records in his memoir, Aiming High.

The shell-shocked government-selected students watched in disbelief as the steps of the aircraft were dislodged, the doors closed and the flight to Bulgaria started. When the PS learnt what had happened, he ordered that the students be driven back to Kenya Institute of Administration as the government looked for ways to avoid a major scandal.

It later emerged that a senior minister who Matiba does not name conspired with the Bulgarian government to carry out the scheme, leaving the Kenya government with an egg on its face.

The impasse was finally resolved by the government of India which offered to take the students to various institutions to undertake technical courses. Such were the foundations of the famous airlifts that would offer young Kenyans such as Wangari Maathai and Hussein Obama a chance out of the colonial education system which had only specialised in training artisans and clerical officers to serve their masters.