2012 wrote:This Precious Talent school incident just shows you the huge divide between the rich and poor in our society. A week is not over and this incident has already done its time and thrown to the kaburi la sahau.
Even that delinquent boy trended for longer because he was 'middle class', I can assure you if he was from a poor school it would have been normal because they are not expected to have manners anyway.
The gap between the 'have' and 'have nots' in Kenya is huge!
I remember in my primary school times, over 95% of us went to public schools. I didn't even know one kid from a private school not even Indians and I schooled with some. Private schools were not even a thought because they were for the super rich not even middle class could afford. We used to look up to Hospital Hill, Nairobi School, Moi Avenue as being the best schools. The population grew but those schools remained the same prompting the upspring of middle-class private schools. While the 'real' private schools (eg Braeburn)cost about shs.50k a term back then, the emerging middle class private schools were about 10k-15k of course all later increased to stand now at over 500k+ for the rich and between 50k - 100k for the middle class while leaving the free public schools to the poor. The interesting thing is that the poor were also not satisfied with the quality of public schools education and the few could also not handle the numbers and other logistics hence the mushrooming of these other private schools. It's tragic but they are a necessary evil under the current status. It's happening with hospitals, jobs and housing too.
What I don't know is if this is sustainable, what I do know is Uhuru and his government have no answers being the worst regime after the fall of dictatorship.
I think the title of this thread should change to "The dark evolution to schooling in
Nairobi."
Kenyans living in less congested cities/towns of Kenya are still taking their kids to public primary schools and are also accessing healthcare in the numerous level-3, level-4 and level-5 hospitals scattered in this country.
You will be surprised that TSC/GoK is the largest employer of
qualified teachers all of whom who teach in public schools including those in Nairobi. The same goes to counties. They are the largest employers of qualified health professionals in this republic. The fact is..... very few of the so called "academies/private schools" can match public schools in terms of infrastructure. By infrastructure i mean a number of classrooms, number of teachers, toilets, playing fields, staff rooms etc.It is the same same for government/public hospitals. Very few private hospitals can compare to say Kenyatta National Hospital in terms of services rendered, inpatient capacity and concentration of
specialist doctors.Shalom hospital in DC cannot simply not compare to Kajiado county hospital in terms of staffing as well as mijengo and facilities. It is a no-brainer that Kajiado County Hospital is by far better hospital and relatively cheap for common mwananchi.
But DC is not Nairobi and Neither is Nakuru or Kisumu. Government of Kenya has simply been in deep slumber(over 3 decades) as far as Nairobi is concerned. The population of Nairobi has steadily grown but yet the government has not allocated enough resources to cater for
basic services such as health, transport, housing and education. There are simply not enough public schools in Nairobi a gap that has been aptly been filled by
sub-standard private schools.The same applies to housing and transport.
I have suggested before that Nairobi as it is today is no longer sustainable. There is need to build a mini-city for the masses that has enough schools and proper.infrastructure where water flows from taps everday, children walk to school, there are efficient and subsidized
public mass-trasport systems and other public facilities.
In conclusion, i believe the problem is currently mainly in Nairobi. I hope that other cities of Kenya have learned from mistakes that have been made in Nairobi and should make plans to avoid them.
Dumb money becomes dumb only when it listens to smart money