Parents did not take their children to study on the road

Dear Prof Magoha,

We would’ve greeted you and asked how you’re doing, but we fear KRA might introduce a greetings tax, and ask us why we need your health report; yet you’re the one who went to medical school.

Nonetheless, Kenyan parents have been camping in my inbox asking why I look happy while the Education ministry has been tossing their children like tennis balls. They’re asking for a minute of your time, because that’s what they can afford right now; after using all the money to take their children to secondary school.

Our children have just returned for midterm break, less than two weeks after they left home to join Form One. We’d like to take this earliest opportunity to thank you for rewriting the school calendar to remind parents that children don’t belong in school. We hope teachers won’t complain they’re being paid to wish children safe travels.

While we appreciate your efforts to strengthen family ties by reducing the time they spend in school, we’d like to express our ear about their safety on the road, and being seen by those who loaned us school fees cash.

Just two weeks ago, parents broke their piggy banks to raise school fees; and their voices for the reduction of prices of toothpaste. The savings weren’t enough to check off the long list of admission requirements, with most parents forced to hit the streets to beg for money to buy dirt-proof uniform and mattress made in heaven.

Form One admission

Begging, like driving on Mombasa Road, isn’t easy. It dehumanises you, lowers your self-esteem, makes you an easy target for ridicule, and invites takers to dismantle the dignity you constructed with your own reputation.

Parents who borrowed fare to send their children to school are currently under self-imposed curfew at home. They can’t afford to be seen outside for fear of being stopped and getting stripped by auctioneers. They had promised to refund the soft loan when the month ends, but the month hasn’t ended and their children need more transport money when midterm ends today.

If you don’t mind, parents want the ministry to help them with more convincing lines to beg for another loan. This is an area the government has experience in, for we still wonder how you manage to do it effortlessly with our international lenders.

We ask for this desperate help because we don’t know where to turn to; now that mobile money lenders are already calling our landlords with our credit ratings, asking them not to smile with us anymore until we speak to their mobile wallets.

When parents complained about the Form One admission matrix, you asked them to focus on the bigger picture of helping achieve the 100 per cent transition; even when the only picture we could see was of officials burning fat allowances combing urban slums looking for children who were yet to report to Form One.

Study on the road

In the past two weeks, our children have traversed the four corners of this country making the ministry happy that their transition policy is working, and it’s time for you to smile back at us, even when we know we have a higher chance of success drawing blood from a stone.

There is nothing Form Ones learnt in the two weeks they’ve been in school. Two weeks training isn’t even enough for a child to earn a certificate of participation in shoe polishing, let alone Introduction to Chemistry.

If you can, and you can, because if you can’t no one can; we are begging you to find a way in which our children can spend more time in school than on the road.

We we don’t want to expose them to rogue motorists who only see courtesy in the dictionary, and engineers who punish road users with non-existent signage.

If we wanted our children to study on the road, we would’ve asked the President to put schools under the Ministry of Roads, hoping it would stop the Nairobi Expressway from making us pass water in traffic.

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