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The categorisation of schools into National, Provincial (now Extra-County), County, and District (or Sub-County) tiers is sold as a masterstroke for national cohesion. The narrative is seductive, positioning national schools to mix bright minds from across the republic, forging bonds that transcend tribe and region.
Provincial ones bridge the gap, while district schools ensure local access. But let’s cut through the rhetoric, this system is a carryover of colonial engineering, repackaged to perpetuate elite privilege and ethnic hierarchies. Its hidden motives?
To concentrate resources in historically favoured areas, rewarding the powerful while sidelining the marginalised. The outcomes? A fractured society breeding educated tribalists and entrenched inequality, far from the unity it claims to build.
Flash back to post-independence Kenya. The Ominde Report (Kenya Education Commission) of 1964, which, among other recommendations, endorsed Free Primary Education as a valid objective of educational policy.
The report cautioned that the expansion of primary education must not be allowed to debase quality. The report recommended that all concerned with the schools, including parents, should cooperate towards the creation of “racial unconsciousness”.
Subsequent policies, like the 8-4-4 curriculum in 1985, formalised this hierarchy under the guise of meritocracy. National schools’ elite bastions like Alliance, Mang’u and Maseno were to admit top KCPE performers nationwide, with quotas to promote diversity. Yet, the blueprint was tainted from the start.
As activist Cyprian Nyamwamu aptly dissected in a radio interview, Kenya inherited a railway line state from British colonisers. Infrastructure, including schools, hospitals, and military bases, clustered along the Mombasa-Kisumu rail with branches to Nanyuki and Eldoret. Missionaries built these national gems not in arid wastelands but in fertile, accessible zones; often in Central and Rift Valley regions dominated by certain ethnic groups.
The motive? Efficient control and economic extraction during colonialism, evolving into post-1963 favouritism. Sessional Paper No. 10 of 1965 on African Socialism endorsed this uneven development, prioritising high-potential areas. Presidents since Jomo Kenyatta amplified it. More national schools in Kiambu than in the entire region, like North Eastern. Admissions favour locals with quotas, entrenching advantages for groups with historical access to missionary education. It’s no accident that alumni networks from these schools dominate politics, business, and bureaucracy; a self-reinforcing cycle of power.
Contrast this with the outcomes. A stark division, not cohesion. District schools, managed by District Education Boards (D.E.B.), became dumping grounds for the rest of rural, underfunded, stigmatised as “D.F.” (District Focus) for villagers. This slur emerged from Moi’s 1983 District Focus for Rural Development policy, meant to decentralise but instead highlighted rural-urban chasms.
Students in West Pokot or Turkana, lacking labs or teachers, couldn’t compete for national slots. The result? A meritocracy in name only, where geography and ethnicity dictate destiny. Worse, this breeds educated tribalists. National schools promise multiculturalism, but uneven distribution fuels resentment. A child from Wajir scores high but lands in a crumbling district school, while Kiambu locals glide into Mang’u.
Today, with CBC forcing 14-year-olds into specialised pathways amid funding crises, the chaos deepens. Families scramble for fees, confused by STEM vs. humanities labels, while kids of the rich attend international schools untouched by this mess.
A system touting cohesion has amplified tribalism and social disenfranchisement. Post-2007 election violence exposed how education disparities stoke ethnic fires. Devolution post-2010 rebranded tiers to counties, but inequities persist as 70 percent of county budgets are swallowed by salaries, leaving little for development.
It is time to dismantle this charade by scrapping the categories and investing equitably nationwide. Make every school national in quality.
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By Lawi Sultan Njeremani