Poor managers pose huge risk to Kenya’s education

With schools closed since March, Covid-19 has served as a tough test to the Kenyan system of education.

The education sector is falling apart under the weight of the virus, but there is no vaccine in sight for the incompetence on which universities and the ministry of education are run.

Higher education centres on passing on higher ideals to the learners, not building high-rise towers on campus or promising students high-paying jobs if they take certain courses. Kenyan education is however not about honour, morality, honesty, freedom, critical thinking, or social justice.

 It has systematically been turned into a profit-seeking enterprise and a platform for bootlicking one’s seniors. Students are made to think primarily about the money they can mint from their certificates if they take certain “marketable” courses.

Education officials are the ones worst hit by this lack of basic values. Education Cabinet Secretary, Prof George Magoha, is on record saying that he is awaiting a presidential directive on when and how to reopen schools, although he also claims his ministry has put in place measures to provide education in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis.

Covid-19

If President Kenyatta has turned out to be such a micro-manager as to be the one to tell the ministry officials when nursery school kids can start singing A-B-C-D together again, we are in a lot of trouble.

 The President isn’t an educationist; it is the education ministry officials and teachers who should be guiding him and the whole nation on how to safely get students back to the classrooms.

To be sure, most countries have been blindsided by the virus. In the US, the Republicans want schools re-opened immediately. This is to help them downplay the effects of Covid-19 on the Trump administration as it struggles to be re-elected in November. The Democrats prefer continued lockdown of schools, probably also pursuing partisan interests.

However, despite the divided opinion, individual schools have been restructuring their facilities to enable social distancing and hybrid teaching at the beginning of the next school term.

Relative to Kenya, the US has a huge advantage. Its system does not rely as heavily as Kenya’s on boarding high schools. College hostel rooms are not shared. By contrast, Kenyan schools are crowded. In Kenya we use double-decker beds, even at the college level. It would be difficult to control the virus in our institutions.

But our greatest problem is the collapse of basic moral values in the Kenyan society, thanks to leaders who display impunity and lethargy in public. Among the high school students that I have talked to, our kids’ greatest fear about schools reopening is that their masks would be stolen, leading to punishment or expulsion by some of their petty teachers.

The US schools are doing a better job already in enforcing the protocols of preventing the spread of COVID-19 once schools reopen. They have free masks at the entrance of every building, and the students and staff have been trained on how to use them.

There is no talk of punishing students, unlike in Kenya where threats are common and, in the initial days of the pandemic, the police enforcing anti-Covid-19 curfews killed more people than the virus itself.

The problems facing the Kenyan education ministry stem from the fact that it not only uses outdated management techniques, but it is run by non-educationists. Prof Magoha is not an educationist; he is a urologist, specialising in the problems of a part of the human body quite some distance from the brain.

Most of Prof Magoha’s pronouncements on education are unpredictable and full of threats. .

As a university student and junior lecturer at the University of Nairobi, I had a mild case of Oedipus complex, academically speaking. In Freudian psychoanalysis, this is a boy’s subconscious wish to kill his father and sleep with his mother.

Except Opiyo Mumma, Fred Matiang’i, and Henry Indangasi, I thought all my male professors were quacks mistaken for dons. I very much doubted their competence, including that of senior university officials — among them Prof Magoha, then the Deputy Vice Chancellor.

Today I don’t think mine was just a case of a young man’s misdirected libido. I would watch an unsmiling Prof Magoha conducting on campus what our educationists call “management by walking around” .  This involves a boss (usually the headmaster) roaming around through the school facilities, generally at random and in an unstructured manner, to check if teachers are working as expected and if pupils are making noise or misbehaving.

Watching Prof Magoha shouting orders and reprimands at intimidated sweepers on campus, I at that time thought the style of management was intimidating. It was the time in Kenya that the management style was given the name “mbwa”,  a Swahili word for dog. It was, I later understood, proposed by management consultants Tom Peters and Robert H. Waterman in their 1982 book, In Search of Excellence. An equivalent of Toyota’s “gemba” style of management, MBWA can be effective if used in the right way.

Unfortunately, in the Kenyan situation, where management is top-down and colonialist, Mbwa involves barking at people to intimidate them into silence, throwing your weight around like a bulldog, and at the same time wagging your tail at the boss.

Abuse of power

We associate our fashion of MBWA with “no-nonsense” management, but it’s actually a symptom of cluelessness and abuse of power.

Since Prof Magoha’s tenure at the University of Nairobi, university leaders across the country like praising themselves for fewer occurrences of riots on their campuses.

However, the infrequency of riots doesn’t mean that the students are more disciplined or the universities better run than before.

Rather, the administrations have managed not only to cow students into silence with threats but also to compromise student leadership. In a highly corrupt system, it is likely student leaders draw a regular informal stipend from the administration to ensure peace on campus.

After college, students leader who went to school during the “riot-infested” years (e.g., James Orengo and Kabando wa Kabando) are far more disciplined servants of the people than their counterparts who went to the university during the so-called peaceful times, some of whom walk around pubs shooting innocent people.

Generally faced with such a bad management style that doesn’t care about higher values, universities might collapse in the midst of Covid-19 unless they radically change.

They particularly need to rethink the usefulness of terminal exams, which for a long time have accounted for 70 percent of a student's grade.

I sat in a virtual exam room last week with a sociology professor at a Kenyan university, and it was clear his students were just cheating throughout. Some finished writing the three-hour exam in minutes.

Even in ordinary times, most of the highly ranked universities in the world have done away with high-stakes terminal exams, focusing on continuous assessment. In Norway, a terminal exam contributes only 20 percent of the university-entry grade. It is less valued at the university level.

Sadly, because our university leaders are not educationists but sycophants, they don’t even have centres of teaching excellence in which professors can develop effective 21st-century methods of teaching and evaluation that would be useful in these times.

Prof Mwangi teaches English and Comparative Literature in a US university

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