Expelleus Professors at the Ministry of Education

The Ministry of Education seems to resemble the works found in the fantasy novel Harry Potter written by J. K. Rowling in some ways. The Ministry has been faced with revelations that Kshs 4.2 Billion was misallocated (call it fraud). These monies were under the Kenya Education Sector Support Program (KESSP) for construction projects. Monies allocated by donor agencies to support the free primary education that won the then elected NARC government in 2002 world praise for this endeavor.

The then NARC government had assumed power with a promise of free primary education which it honored. However, it had its own challenges in the beginning such as funding of infrastructure in schools and so the donor community stepped in to fill in these gaps.

So there have been acrimonies on who should take blame since from inception 2003-2008 the Minister for Education was Prof. George Saitoti (Currently he is Minister of State & Internal Security and acting Foreign affairs Minister). This post was taken over by Prof. Sam Ongeri to date. Also, the Permanent Secretary (Chief Accounting Officer at any Ministry) from inception 2003-2009 was Prof. Kagega Mutahi (Currently Local Government PS) and his post was taken by Prof. James ole Kiyiapi 

Questions

What raises questions to me is that despite the Ministry being headed by Professors who are expected by society to know it all. They seem not to know some simple facts such as when aspersions are cast against their Ministry the best thing is to ‘step aside’ and allow for investigations. Once the investigations are done then if they are not party to the investigation the allegations raised they will resume their positions. One would expect with the coming in of the new constitutional dispensation which has a chapter that deals with ethics then such things should be of the past

One has to wonder if there is a secret order (say, order of the phoenix) that is based at the Ministry whose work is to siphon monies meant for young children education.

Civil Servant Running for President

The other shocking thing that I have noticed is that a sitting civil servant has began campaigning for the office of the president while still in office. Going by the facebook pages of Prof. James Ole Kiyiapi (they are two. One even gives his big curriculum vitae) one would expect at least one to resign so as to concentrate on the other.

There is nothing wrong running for president but for civil servants to run for the high office goes against the public office ethics act and I have not seen anyone commenting on this! Perhaps there could be a lead with missing funds and the presidency run?