Education review task force back to the drawing board after Ruto denounce their recommendations
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Education review task force calls for a crisis meeting after President is said to be unimpressed by their recommendations
Education review task force calls for a crisis meeting after President is said to be unimpressed by their recommendations.
The Presidential Working Party on Education Reforms (PWPER) delivered its second interim report on Thursday, but President William Ruto wasn’t impressed and requested them to come up with stronger suggestions.
The President reportedly wasn’t convinced by their plans, particularly about university funding, and urged them to reconsider them before submitting their final submissions.
Raphael Munavu, the chairperson of PWPER, has therefore convened a crisis meeting to plan how to address the President’s concerns.
“We need to align ourselves to the national development agenda and the Kenya Kwanza vision. I felt we presented nothing new from what’s already in the public domain. We need to account for our appointment and use of public resources,” another source said. The PWPER has a budget of Sh236 million.
Speaking to Daily Nation, Members of the PWPER said that the general feeling is that they did not properly interpret their terms of reference.
The President told them that their report was “ordinary”, an indication that it was below his expectation.
The education task force had recommended that the government bails out the cash-strapped public universities, which have an accumulated debt of over Sh56 billion.
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However, President Ruto questioned the rationale behind that and whether it will be sustainable in the long run.
Most of the money that the universities owe is what is owed by the Exchequer in capitation.
“He told us to go think through the proposals. It was a good eye-opener. Sometimes you think you’re doing the right thing until it’s interrogated. It was a good discussion and thinking through the different scenarios,” a source said.
Of contention also was whether some of the models proposed by the working party have been tested.
A source intimated that the President’s economic advisers were wary of pumping more money into public universities without proper structures to ensure they do not slip back into the same problems.
The lack of clear direction on funding may delay the admission of the more than 173,000 students who qualified for university admission in the Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education results released last month.
The team was also taken to task over whether the government would afford to sponsor all of them as has been the case since 2017.
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