- "As scholars, you know the saying: to destroy a nation, you don't need an atomic bomb or long-range missiles. All you need to do is lower the quality of education."
- "It is the reason why I have hired 56,000 new teachers in the last two years the largest in the history of Kenya," he said.
Image: PCS
President William Ruto has sounded the alarm on the challenges facing Kenya's education system, cautioning that poor education and exam cheating could lead to the downfall of a nation.
"As scholars, you know the saying: to destroy a nation, you don't need an atomic bomb or long-range missiles. All you need to do is lower the quality of education and if there is exam cheating you will have destroyed a nation," he warned.
Speaking during a town hall meeting, he noted that many citizens were concerned about the future of their children after Grade Six and the status of the Competency-Based Curriculum (CBC).
He additionally said that 23 out of 40 Kenyan universities were nearly bankrupt due to government debts.
"23 out of our 40 universities were technically bankrupt, or insolvent because the government of Kenya had debts owned to universities. 135 or 38 billion to public universities and about 51 billion shillings to private universities and many of our universities could hardly pay salaries, some of them paid half of their salaries," he said.
He gave a scenario where he talked with a chancellor who talked about how they had to cut lecturers' pay.
"I talked with a chancellor in one of the universities who told me they have never paid salaries in full for the last 13 years to lecturers and also many suppliers who were not paid."
Ruto said in response, he formed a 42-member task force to address these issues, aiming to protect the nation's future by strengthening the education sector.
"When I came into office, among the first things that I did because we needed to save our education system, I appointed a 42-person task force made of education professionals, people who had run schools, universities and colleges. People who had experience and they took almost eight months and I tasked them with sorting the issues in our education sector
"These great professionals and I have every reason to believe they did a good job, they came up with recommendations on what to do with CBC, recommendations that we have implemented, and to a great extent, we now have an aligned competent based education system," Ruto said.
Ruto said the task force also recommended what he needed to do in terms of teacher and pupil ratio.
"It is the reason why I have hired 56,000 new teachers in the last two years the largest in the history of Kenya. It is also the reason why we are implementing the student-centered funding model," he said.