Decades of joblessness induced by state-sanctioned corruption has seen many Kenyans develop cold feet towards university education.
According to the Kenya Universities and Colleges Central Placement Service, many students have chosen technical and vocational education over certain university courses.
Whether the discourse is at an academic forum or casual bar talk, this diminishing enthusiasm for university education is attributed to the soaring number of university graduates without decent jobs.
While it’s indisputable that skills-based training can offer an easy route to self-reliance, it's not a practical solution to the unemployment crisis in our country.
Kenya boasts thousands of skilled men and women in the informal sector, popularly known as the jua kali, but lack of support by the state has condemned them to a cycle of poverty.
Few of them can afford a decent education for their children.
They live in desolate conditions in the sprawling slums of major towns, and more often than not, have to put up with abuse from the upper and middle classes of our society, their major clients.
You pay a carpenter Sh500 and expect him to part ways with poverty? By inadvertently adding another pool of people to the sector without a tangible policy shift aimed at revamping the manufacturing sector, the country is engaging in a wild goose chase.
In the next few years, we could end up grappling with a bitter and unforgiving generation of jobless TVET graduates.
Nations are not built on knee-jerk reactions to problems but sound economic policies.
Just like the post-2010 Kenyan generation that was duped that quail eggs were the solution to every problem on earth, another generation is being misled that TVETs are the answer to our unemployment crisis.
Our problem as a country has never been that we have more graduates than jobs or some university courses are useless, but that the culture of corruption has brought down industries and denied thousands their right to employment and decent living.
Billions of shillings enough to put up factories and support innovation and entrepreneurship are lost annually at both the national and county governments, but we are somehow deluded that TVETs will slay this ugly dragon.
TVETs are not bad, but we have to be alive to the fact that if we don't slay the dragon of corruption, they too will experience no admission in the future.
Freelance journalist and writer
Edited by Kiilu Damaris
