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There is a strange comedy unfolding in Kenya’s education sector.
Parliament is considering the Basic Education Bill, 2026, a sweeping proposal touching school governance, financing, learner welfare, teacher management, quality assurance, and education data. Stakeholders, including parents and education groups, are already demanding changes.
Meanwhile, KNEC is counting coins with the seriousness of a grandmother counting beans before supper. The Council faces a projected funding shortfall of about Sh6.71 billion in 2026/27, after a Sh2.58 billion gap in 2025/26. More than 3.6 million learners are expected to participate in this year’s national assessments and examinations.
This is Kenya’s education reform philosophy in one picture: Build a new house while borrowing money to repair the old door.
And teachers are beginning to ask the most dangerous question in education: Who will pay the teacher?
KUPPET has demanded an agreement with KNEC clarifying payment rates and timelines for teachers involved in supervision, marking and other examination duties. The dispute follows earlier delays in paying examination personnel, although the government later released Sh1.5 billion to clear outstanding 2025 marking allowances.
So the education system now resembles a village wedding where everybody has been invited, the MC has arrived, the bride is wearing the dress, the priest is clearing his throat, and somebody has suddenly discovered that nobody paid for the chairs.
Yet we continue calling this education reform. Perhaps Kenya needs a new subject called Advanced Education Confusion.
Lesson One: Change the curriculum.
Lesson Two: Change the assessment.
Lesson Three: Change the funding model.
Lesson Four: Change the Bill.
Lesson Five: Forget to change the money.
Lesson Six: Ask teachers to remain patriotic.
The proposed law may well be intended to modernise basic education. But reform is not merely changing paragraphs in legislation. A functioning education system requires teachers, infrastructure, learning materials, assessment systems and predictable financing.
Otherwise, we are merely redecorating the classroom while the pupils sit on the floor.
The greatest joke is that examinations are treated as national emergencies only after the examination clock begins ticking.
KNEC has even been exploring paperless examinations partly because printing, logistics, transportation and security consume enormous resources. That sounds wonderfully futuristic.
But before Kenya enters the era of paperless examinations, perhaps it should first enter the era of paperless excuses.
Because teachers cannot eat digital promises.
They cannot pay rent with artificial intelligence.
They cannot send their children to school using a PowerPoint presentation.
And a KNEC examiner cannot deposit “Government is processing your payment” at the supermarket.
The danger is that education is slowly becoming a national experiment in institutional improvisation.
Schools receive insufficient capitation.
Universities complain about funding.
Teachers negotiate payments.
Examiners wait.
Parents complain.
Students improvise.
Parliament investigates.
The Ministry explains.
Treasury blames resources.
Then everybody returns to class.
This is not a system.
It is a relay race in which everybody is running but nobody knows where the finish line is.
And the children?
They are watching.
They are learning something far more powerful than what appears in the curriculum.
They are learning that in Kenya, sometimes the examination begins before the lesson.
The real question is therefore not whether Kenya should reform education.
Of course it should.
The question is whether we have learned that reform without resources is merely ambition wearing a government tie.
You can rename a class.
You can redesign a curriculum.
You can introduce a new assessment.
You can pass a new law.
But if the teacher stands before thirty hungry children with an empty stomach and an unpaid allowance, the most sophisticated education policy in Nairobi becomes a village proverb:
You cannot milk a cow that has not been fed.
If the blackboard is cracked, the teacher is hungry, the examiner is unpaid and the school is broke, what exactly are we reforming? The education system or the paperwork describing it?
And Kenya, as usual, is preparing for an examination for which the government itself appears not to have revised.
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By Joel Changorok