Fred Matiang'i is on the right track

Education Cabinet Secretary Fred Matiang’i

Duty has brought me to China. Allow me to start with a short true Chinese horror story, which was on the front pages of the dailies in Beijing on Thursday.

The chilling story goes that in 1976, an earthquake of the magnitude of 7.8 on the Richter scale flattened the industrial city of Tangshan.

The disaster killed 242,000 people. In total, 7,200 families were wiped off the face of the earth in one calamitous wave.

Accounts of natural calamities feature in real-life stories of the Chinese, Japanese, Malaysians and Vietnamese, among other Asiatics.

In Japan a decade ago, I recall the stamp of pride in technology that saw them put a warning that the hotel I was staying in, in Tokyo, was built to withstand an earthquake 100 times stronger than the dreaded one in Kanto and that it was safer staying in than rushing out.

We started off with these natural calamities because of the current wave of school fires in our country. I left the fires burning last Sunday and it is sad it is the only news alert coming my way.

The reason this scares me is because of the past incidents involving fire that killed hapless children: Bombolulu, Kyanguli and Asumbi Girls.

Several theories have come up to explain why our children are burning dormitories, unconcerned where they will sleep when sanity prevails and the cost burden to be passed on to their parents, many of whom are still grappling with fee balances.

Various reasons have been offered as to why these fires are going on even as pressure mounts on Education Cabinet Secretary Dr Fred Matiang’i to close schools as a safety valve for the simmering emotions, or for the President to step in as our Chief Executive, and cracked the whip.

One school of thought says students are angry about the high-handedness of their teachers and principals. They want more democratic space. Well, if you support this theory, including the nonsense by Knut secretary general Sossion, then you need to be whipped by elders using the cured palm tree twig that our mothers use to clean the inside of milk calabashes.

In the Kalenjin dialect, to which I and the embittered Knut boss subscribe, that is what ‘sossion’ means and its two uses. They work well on the flesh because they bend without snapping.

The other reason our usual skeptics have come up with, buoyed by belief that some Jubilee top operatives remain administrative greenhorns who excel in crafting insults against the Opposition, stuffing their pockets and rolling out sweet PR gibberish tribal Kenyans want to hear, that this is an act of sabotage by the Opposition and probably even terror cells.

Well, they haven’t told us how this is possible given that many of the schools affected are in their strongholds.

My view is that it is reckless and counter-productive to suggest that security teams of a country waging foreign war have no clue or are disinterested to know and deal with the architects of school fires.

The more plausible reason, and this is not to lure the minds of those in the Task Force Matiang’i set up, is that after the secondary school heads function in Mombasa, where the CS vowed the ministry will take up the billion shillings text book procurement programme, the administrators conspired to teach him a lesson.

The conspiracy theorists here argue that the CS cut off the hidden tripartite lifeline that existed between textbook publishers, curriculum developers who recommend which books to be used, and Teachers Service Commission mandarins, who as ‘employers’ got a piece of the succulent pie. The objective, they claim, is to cause anarchy in the sector, turn anger jets against the CS, and being the campaign season, arm-twist Uhuru to sack or transfer Matiang’i’ from Jogoo House.

I am of the view that if this is the intelligence he is getting then he should call their bluff and declare he would stand by this CS.

After all there is a precedent; before it became untenable to keep protecting Anne Waiguru, he said he was unmoved because she was clean and hardworking! In my view Matiang’i holds more promise for Jubilee than some 10 thieving top officials I know, combined!

The more reason why Uhuru should choose this option is if it is indeed true that the CS slayed another dragon of corruption and malaise in the sector. Those who know say the exam administrators used to ‘sell’ topics from which questions would come from at a fixed fee.

Parents would in turn be asked to pay up via the excuse of ‘motivation fee’. Now both the teachers and the children have found a merger of interests.

One doesn’t know where to put emphasis on in revision and the other is scared of failing to deliver stellar performance. Whatever the cause of the fires, let us agree on one conclusion: they are criminal acts and should be dealt with as such.

Secondly, we gain more if Matiang’i remains at the watchtower. Therefore, calls for a return to the old order by Mr Raila Odinga are not only retrogressive and self-defeatist, they are a betrayal of the dreams we have for our children.