Should government stop everything and focus on education?

By MUNGAI KIHANYA

The Sunday Nation

Nairobi,

09 November 2025

Our public education sector is serious financial problems. Our universities are all insolvent; their assets are less than their liabilities to the tune of billions of shillings. Our schools are struggling under the weight of pending bills to suppliers. Lecturers have just ended a 49-day strike. Fortunately, teachers are not paid directly by the schools. If that was the case, they too would have taken similar industrial action.

This is happening we are putting about 28 percent (or Sh700 billion) of all government expenditure into education. Isn’t this enough money? The simple answer is that it is not. First, let’s bear in mind that almost half of this money goes to paying the salaries of teachers alone – about Sh300 billion.

I think the problem arises from the fact that the ministry of education does not adjust its cost estimates for these institutions to keep up with inflation. University funding, for example, is still based on costing that was done in the early 1990s!

This week, the ministry announced the boarding fees to be charged by senior secondary school - Sh53,554 per year. This figure was set in the year 2015 – ten years ago! In that year, the price of a bag of maize was about Sh2,800; today it has almost doubled to more that Sh5,000.

Indeed, if we look at the consumer price index which monitors inflation, we find that in January 2015 it was at 78 while in October 2025 it was 146. This translates to a 90 per cent increase in average prices of goods and services in Kenya. It is therefore clearly unreasonable to expect that schools will be able to meet their obligations with the same money.

To simply keep up with inflation, the secondary boarding fees should be raised to about Sh100,000 today. And the day school capitation should be increased from the current Sh22,000 (a figure that was also set in 2015) to about Sh50,000.

Similar adjustments are needed in university funding. In 1993 when the costing was fixed, the CPI was about 10, therefore the funding needs to be adjusted by a factor of about 15 from the current Sh200,000 to about Sh3 million per student!

The case of primary schools is quite sad: they get Sh1,400 per child per year! The fair amount is at least Sh10,000.

So, the question that arises is: if we were to spend that much on education, would there be any money remaining for anything else? Well; Kenyan parents are known to sell everything they own in order to educate their children, I think it’s OK for the government to do likewise.