No, Prof, theatre and film won't pull the country out of poverty

A group of artists rehearse in a makeshift theatre at Lake View Estate in Nakuru, keeping the spirit of performance alive. Despite being listed among UNESCO’s Creative Cities, Nakuru lacks a single functioning cinema hall, and the iconic Nakuru Players Theatre remains closed due to management challenges. [Kipsang Joseph, Standard]

I read Prof Egara Kabaji’s article titled “Don’t just focus on STEM, content production is the real goldmine” with muffled amusement and unequivocal disapproval.

The good professor, who taught and mentored me during my undergraduate years at Masinde Muliro University, and whose intellectual acumen and scholarly exploits I am deeply enamoured of, made an outlandish claim that theatre and film, primed to be taught to our senior secondary students, could lift Kenya out of poverty. This assertion, backed by weak arguments with hardly any credible data, statistics or research findings, cannot go unchallenged.