• School heads complain that publishers don't deliver to schools, forcing them to travel long distances to joint collection points.
• Publishers also want the ministry to include set books in their contract to curb piracy
Image: BRIAN OTIENO
Publishers have assured headteachers and the Education ministry they will distribute Grade 4 textbooks by the time schools open for First Term next month.
School heads attending the 15th Kenya Primary School Headteachers Annual Conference in Mombasa had complained of being forced to travel long distances to collect the books from distant places instead of being delivered at the institutions.
Moran Publishers, however, said they have been honouring their contracts, which stipulate that they deliver books to individual schools.
“I don’t know about the others but we have no problem with schools because we have been delivering books to schools directly,” Moran PR and brand manager Blaise Mwangi said.
Mwangi said so far, they have distributed Grade 4 textbooks to 24 counties.
“We started with the far-flung counties including Mandera and Lamu. Now we have distributed to Nairobi, Murang’a, Tharaka Nithi, among other counties,” he said and promised that they will beat the December 9 deadline set by the ministry for the delivery.
The publishers also called on the Education ministry to include set books in the contracts to beat pirates.
Piracy, they said, is eating into their revenue bases and also affecting the standards of education.
Mwangi said pirates focus their efforts on set books which the government buys from directly from bookshops.
This means the government may be buying books from unregulated publishers or bookshops.
“Right now, we have check tags in all the books we supply. The check tags have a unique code that one is supposed to send to 22776 to verify the authenticity of the book. This is how we have been able to beat the pirates,” Mwangi said.
He said pirated copies are sold cheaply but are of poor quality.
Pirates do not pay the 16 per cent VAT, royalties to authors and have no marketing costs among other things.
“They are also unregulated so they save cost by using low-quality papers. This is costly to parents because when they buy the set books, they are worn out in two months and are forced to buy more."
Longhorn Publishers said piracy has consumed about 30 per cent of the publishers’ market share.
Primary Education deputy director Nerea Olick said headteachers should not go to a central point to collect textbooks.
“That is not the agreement we have with the suppliers. The agreement is the textbooks must be delivered to schools, not the sub-county director’s office or any other place,” Olick said.
She told the headteachers not to sign for any delivery without confirming the content.
“Some have been asked to sign for the delivery of boxes of textbooks which are still sealed. By the time they open the boxes, they find the textbooks delivered are not those requested or the number is not enough. In the end, we pay for books not delivered,” Olick said.
Edited by R.Wamochie