The past few weeks have been difficult for school heads as boys and girls as young as 14 years have gone on rampage burning school facilities.
Despite destroying property worth millions of shillings without an iota of responsibility and regret, no serious consequences have been witnessed in Kenyan schools since the deadly March 26, 2001 inferno at Kyanguli Secondary School which claimed the lives of 59 students but the ongoing unrest in schools cannot be ignored.
Prior to the Kyanguli tragedy no one ever thought that a school fire would ever claim a life again after the 1998 Bombolulu tragedy that claimed the lives of over 20 innocent school girls in a locked dormitory, BUT Kyanguli happened, we are yet to witness the worst.
What could have gone so wrong within our education sector? While as a chunk of these challenges are related to poor administration of schools coupled with negligence and ineptness of school boards and policy makers, serious cases of indiscipline have everything to do with our discipline as a society, irresponsible parenting and lack of proper mentorship right from political leadership, the church all the way to the nuclear families.
As a matter of fact, lack of parental guidance is the main cause of these unrests; parents have become so permissive unlike in the traditional African society where parents would instruct their children in morals.
During ‘our’ time, one would be severely disciplined by anybody the age of your parents regardless of your parent’s social class or permission either. However, during this era of capitalism, many parents work most of the time and subsequently, they surrender their responsibilities to teachers in the boarding schools, who are more inclined to academics or the tuition incentives surcharged thereof.
Besides, these strikes occur after a series of incidents that the teachers or administrators either deliberately fail to address or are too incompetent to comprehend in the first place. Further, corruption, greed and general societal moral decay can be related to these unrests. It’s not a surprise that these strikes saw massive demonstrations witnessed in the past few months from the Kenyan political class.
From the ‘teachers strike’ where we saw the immediate role models run in the streets chanting ‘haki yetu’ to Raila led ‘IEBC Demos’ that left several people dead and properties worth millions of shillings destroyed. The youths are the mirror of a society. What we are witnessing in our schools today is purely what we have been breeding in the past few years.
A society that hero-worships ‘political cons’ like Mike Sonko, the infamous ego rider from the lakeside John Mbadi, Kikuyu tribal vermin Moses Kuria, Kamba’s loose cannon Johnstone Muthama, Dandora stone thrower Ferdinand Waititu, or worst still the career student and social brute Babu Owino, can never amount to anything.
At every turn, these are the ‘national mentors’ that our students aspire to be when they grow up. We have militarised, politicised and trivialised every aspect of our society and to expect anything better to arise from our institutions of learning is a mere fallacy. Besides, we’ve heard of cases where teachers have bribed their way to senior administrative positions. Others – especially female heads, are said to have vertically negotiated for these positions.
This has thus sowed discord between the school heads and their juniors who feel short-changed, bypassed, or worse still mistreated. Instead of promoting school heads based on their hard work, skills, and leadership abilities, we’ve instead resulted in rewarding mischief, deceit, greed and incompetence.
How sad we have given merit a wide birth and expect sanity to reign in our schools! As fold, I await a worse school tragedy; with such dangerous trend, my trajectory could be right. Don’t be surprised to wake to ‘news a school’ has hacked to death all teachers living in the school quarters with their families. That’s what happens when a society loses its morals.
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