I would like to draw your attention to an issue that is trending on social media in relation to the dollarisation of the Kenyan economy.
Increasingly, Kenyans are sacrificing their hard-earned income to educate their children in the vast international schools based in Kenya. Sometimes parents want blended learning, starting off in Kenya’s official system of CBC and sending children to international schools later. Or vice versa. Essentially, it is their right as Kenyans to enjoy whatever form of education they desire.
This inalienable right is under assault.
As Dr Wandia Njoya published in the Elephant journal, “Kenya is promoted as a nation for investors and tourists. The focus of Kenya’s consciousness on foreign affirmation would explain why Kenyans experience daily life and institutional and collective processes as a form of physical, moral, emotional and intellectual violence. The institutions are not for serving them, but for pleasing foreigners.”
In direct confirmation of the statement, there is a school offering British curriculum that does not even bother to offer Kenyans a KSH rate to pay their fees. They charge the fees in dollars leaving helpless parents to suffer and lose hard-earned KSH when the dollar rate inflates (as is the norm).
Any attempts to ask the school to consider everyday Kenyans rather than foreign and expatriate communities who are largely ok with dollars, are met with flimsy excuses about the financing of the school in a dollar loan.
Have we turned into Americans overnight? Or are we a foreign colony once more?
Aside from obvious financial discrimination, young Kenyans are subjected to veiled racist discrimination. In one international school, there are so many cases of children being taunted and teased by some foreign teachers. Some have even left the school without bothering to complain or highlight the discrimination to the public. Any report on racism to the school administration is met with denial and ignorance.
Most Kenyans adopt a polite social persona that is increasingly under attack, abuse and misuse by “investors” who want to cash in at their expense. Can you imagine attending university in America and the UK and insisting on paying in Kenyan Shilling? Can a Kenyan survive in a foreign nation where they abuse others?
These institutions should treat the country they are based in with some respect. Let them also realise education is a basic need that needs to be dispensed with some regard above profit.
