Certificates of competition?

Some of us, when we were sprogs, did not face the ignominy of being sent home from school for lack of school fees. Our parents, in one form or the other, guaranteed that our stay in school was smooth and uninterrupted. The number of parents facing mounting financial challenges in 2014 to pay for the continual smooth education of their sprogs is ballooning. Every year many schools "allow" students to sit their final examinations while there are fees arrears to be settled by the students' parents. When the results are declared and certificates posted to the various schools, school administrators take these certificates hostage until the arrears are settled.

Conflicting interests intersect. The Kenya National Examination Council Act declares that examination certificates are the property of the Council until they are transferred into the custody of the relevant candidates. School administrators commit offences when they take these certificates hostage until debts are settled. If the National Executive, with the assistance of Parliament, pays off the debs owed to schools, a sort of moral hazard would develop and more parents would rack up more school fees debt in the certain expectation that the National Government would step in and make things right. If school administrations are permitted to take hostage students' certificates, the risk of those students being left economically behind grow ever larger. Their youth might be mortgaged for a lifetime.

There are no easy answers, but it requires our admitting that the last thirty years were in error. When Peter Oloo Aringo was Education Minister and he introduced the vile concept of cost-sharing in the education sector, he laid the foundation for the certificates' hostage-taking we are witnessing today. Parents have had to dig ever deeper into their pockets to support public schools. Those parents who have the wherewithal and faith to send their children to private schools cannot complain about the swingeing costs. That is not so for parents whose only hope is the public school system.

We made the fateful decision to involve the Government of Kenya in enterprises it could not sustain for long. Our hubris, largely encouraged by "development partners" and sundry friends, has brought us to the brink of bankruptcy at least three times in the last forty years and yet we refuse to learn our lesson. In the twenty-first century, with information about our government's economic performance at our fingertips, we still insist that "only the Government can undertake large-scale infrastructure projects" such as the Standard Gauge Railway, the LAPSSET or the Lake Turkana Windpower Project.  For a nation - and a government - that has hitched its wagons to the "market forces of competition" locomotive, this seems like a strange declaration to make, especially when it denies public schools and public healthcare the public funds that would truly make these essential public goods free for all.

It is only in three areas that the public sector must succeed: education, healthcare and public safety (including national defence) for the nation to succeed. Success in these areas will mean redirecting public funds - national treasure - from white elephant boondoggles meant to line the pockets of a few insiders - and foreign parties. If the Government believes that the LAPSSET is essential to the national economy, it is simplicity itself to auction the right to develop the project to the best bidder and leave the bidder to figure out how to recover his or her investment, and without mortgaging the education of our children for all eternity. That is the power of the market. Competition among the interested parties will either push down the overall price of the LAPSSET or it will guarantee a quality that could not be achieved by traditional tendering of the Build-Operate-Transfer model that our National Executive favours. The same is true of all the multi-billion dollar projects being implemented with a feverish degree of urgency across the nation.

The problem with received wisdom is that every now and then it limits our imagination about what we can achieve should we step outside the limits of that received wisdom. We have been told, over and over, based on ideas of dead while economists, that there are certain projects that can only be financed by the government. If that were true, companies like BP or Apple or Proctor &  Gamble would not be as big as they are or as cash-rich as they are. It is time we re-assessed whether in the desire for the Government of Kenya - rather, key fatcats in the Government of Kenya - and its "development partners" for the maintenance of the status quo is warranted when our children's lives are held hostage to a policy that guarantees hundreds of thousands of them will never be able to prove whether they met certain educational standards or not.