Education is not an ethnic trophy stop politicising schools

Students during Grade 10 admission at Kisumu Day and Boarding High School, on January 12, 2026. [Michael Mute, Standard]

The belief that national schools should be the exclusive preserve of the communities in which they are located betrays a provincial mindset. It reflects a narrow parochialism, often held by those who have not themselves benefitted from a truly national system of education. This outlook helps to explain Kenya’s ethnically polarised and perpetually fractious politics, in which appeals to “my people” routinely supplant issue-based debate and policy-driven choice.

National schools were conceived as instruments of cohesion, drawing together pupils from disparate regions, cultures and social strata. Their founding purpose was to narrow regional inequalities in education by extending opportunity to able students from less advantaged areas. By and large, they have fulfilled this mission as reflected in the strong sense of solidarity and shared identity that endures among their alumni.

Some leaders have suggested that students from certain regions, particularly north-eastern counties, should be barred from attending national schools in Mount Kenya region. Their argument is that these institutions were built by local communities and ought to serve them exclusively.

Alumni associations have moved swiftly to reject this parochialism. Mang’u High School’s alumni, for instance, emphasise that admissions are based on merit and governed by transparent quotas designed to reflect Kenya’s national diversity. Alliance High School’s Old Boys Club goes further, noting that for generations, the school has drawn students from every corner of the country without regard to ethnicity, region or social standing. Such diversity, they argue, is not an accident but a defining feature of the school’s identity and a source of enduring pride.

It is misleading to suggest that leaders from Mount Kenya alone deserve credit for the construction and upkeep of national schools in the region, just as it is erroneous to attribute the dilapidated state of schools elsewhere to indolent local leadership. The explanation lies less in individual effort than in the legacy of public policy. In particular, Sessional Paper Number 10 of 1965, channelled a disproportionate share of national resources to regions that were already comparatively endowed while consigning arid and semi-arid areas to prolonged neglect.

The structural imbalance had enduring consequences. As lawyer Kamotho Waiganjo has observed in a newspaper article, “decades of inequitable allocation of expansive subsidies and other financial support by the central government have privileged many schools, particularly in Central Kenya, and enabled them to outshine their counterparts.”

National schools are, by and large, lavishly resourced, their superior facilities and funding enabling them to attract the best students and teaching staff. Instead of reserving such schools for those fortunate enough to live in their catchment areas, the case should be made for redirecting resources towards less well-endowed institutions, raising them to a standard comparable with that of national schools.

It is overly simplistic to assume that the northern regions, long afflicted by drought, famine and chronic neglect, can, within the relatively brief 15-year lifespan of the Equalisation Fund, be brought to parity with areas that have benefitted from six decades of sustained development. Moreover, education in Kenya is a national government responsibility and should not be left in the hands of local leaders whose primary focus appears to be the cultivation of ethnic fealty through inflammatory interventions in school matters.

Mr Khafafa is a public policy analyst