We have engaged reverse gear with budget cuts in education, health sectors
Alexander Chagema
By
Alexander Chagema
| May 20, 2025
Kenya's socio-political and economic trajectories are headed in one direction: Regression. For every step forward, we seem to move two steps backwards.
A reflection of this unfortunate reality is captured in the ="https://www.standardmedia.co.ke/business/business/article/2001511556/cabinet-approves-sh42-trillion-budget-for-2025-26">2025/2026 budget< proposals and the degenerative states of the health and education sectors.
In the 2025/2026 ="https://www.standardmedia.co.ke/national/article/2001513534/controller-of-budget-seeks-more-millions-for-fy202526">Financial Year<, the amount allocated to the education sector was cut by Sh62 billion while allocation to the health sector was reduced by Sh67.2 billion. In addition to the State-sponsored chaos in public universities, which is pulling them under, funding for students set to join university in September will be slashed. Unlike previous years, there is no allocation for national examinations.
Implementation of CBC, and now CBE, has been chaotic with the government seemingly groping in the dark, lurching from one blunder to another. Junior Secondary Schools (JSS) face the threat of paralysis with a shortage of 72,442 teachers. Secondary schools have a shortage of 26,039 teachers. Today, capitation is going through gradual strangulation.
With this, how can we move the country forward? How do we compete favourably with countries like Singapore, Finland, Japan, Canada and South Korea, whose education systems are considered the best globally, as we seek to be industrialised by 2030? These countries spend between five and 6.5 per cent of their GDPs on education, yet Kenya spends about two per cent.
Adequate resource allocation is necessary to make education work. In Japan, for instance, data shows that the government spends $13,323 (Sh1,731,990) per student annually. In Kenya, a Sh22,244 annual capitation per student is proving too much for the government, yet we are told Sh2 billion goes down the drain every day.
Government honchos must think Kenyans are dunces. It is preposterous that the government is aware Sh2 billion is lost daily through corruption but it has no idea how the money is lost, or how to deal with it. That money is most likely being skimmed off in places where the law is a tolerable inconvenience. Places where the light of accountability doesn't shine.
Unless state planners get it right on education and health, we are destined to watch other countries continually leapfrog us. The World Bank (WB) acknowledges that education is the foundational infrastructure for job creation and a powerful driver of development. Education, WB says, is the strongest instrument for poverty reduction and in improving health. Education is critical to peace and stability.
We need not look beyond the areas where bandits hold sway, where insecurity reigns supreme, where development is abstract, to appreciate the value of education. The northern part of Kenya will remain dangerous until that time the penetration of education will be stepped up. It requires nothing more than political goodwill and commitment to make this happen.
The burden of an uneducated population is reflected in increased poverty levels, petty crime, insecurity and unnecessary conflicts, most of which drain national resources. The government spends a lot of money on arms and deploying security officers in the northern counties, but the only guaranteed result is death. When we lose civilians and security officers in Kerio Valley, it is not to banditry, but to lack of education, and the state stands accused.
Our priorities as a country are warped. The government's erudite fiscal planners would rather allocate State House Sh2.3 billion for renovations than allocate Sh1.6 billion as Kenya’s share in the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation programme for 2025.
There is a serious vaccine shortage, and measles and polio could make a comeback. The withdrawal of USAID health funding programmes in January this year exposed the Kenya Kwanza government's lack of commitment to a healthy nation. HIV and Aids patients no longer get free supplies of ARVs because, for long, the government has considered them a responsibility of the US under the Pepfar programme.
The government should stop playing games with the education and health sectors, drop its exhausting, stale rhetoric and for once don the garment of development. The bottom-up economic model should be operationalised.