Hi, this is Sandy Bansley for Trekking the Planet. We are very honored and privileged
today to be speaking with the Minister of Education for Kenya. And why don't you go
ahead and introduce yourself and tell us about how long you've been in your role.
My name is Mutula Klonzo. I'm an elected member of parliament for an electoral area called
Borne in Makoene County. I have now been serving in parliament for nine years, ten
months, and I'm privileged to be here in charge of an equation. I was transferred to
this ministry barely five months ago and before then I was Minister for
Constitutional Affairs, Justice, National Cohesion and Constitutional Affairs,
where I facilitated the new constitution, I facilitated the referendum that produced
the new constitution of 2020. Yes, yes, we've heard a lot about that Constitution as we've been
traveling through Kenya. So what are your top priorities? I know you've only been in the
job, I think, since March, but what are your top priorities for the education
department? Reform. Reform. I have no doubt in my mind that I was brought here to
facilitate reform. The old constitution didn't mention education at all, but we
have now repeated education in nearly five sections of the new constitution.
We are one of the few countries where education is expressly provided, particularly
for children. It is now a human right of every Kenyan child to have free and
compulsory basic education in the Bill of Rights. Also in the Bill of Rights, we
have also provided the right of every citizen to education, so you can imagine
my challenge. Yes. After I facilitated the new constitution, I've now been here five
months, so my work is primarily to create a legal platform because I'm a trained
lawyer, not really an educationist, not an educationist at all. The only time I
taught was teaching lawyers professional things for eight years in our school of
law, but I'm here primarily to create the legal platforms for implementing the
constitution. As you know, our constitution is broad principles of
expression of broad principles of the wishes of the population, but my work is
now to create the legal platforms, and I'm proud to say that I have complied with
that. I have established the necessary mechanisms. Parliament, as you many must
agree with my proposals for performing education, they have passed all the
primary bills that I have presented, one for teacher service commission, to provide
legal mechanisms for recruitment, deployment, discipline, and other issues
attending to teachers. They have also enacted a new law for management of
national examinations, which I have facilitated since coming to the ministry,
and you'll be surprised, examinations have now started, and it's under new law. I've
also finished and published a new law for curricular development for Kenya, and
that law will be debated in parliament in early November, and I expected to pass.
I've also facilitated a new law for persons with learning disabilities law.
Children, for example, suffering from autism, blind children, children, I've
just come from Thika, and to my amazement, we have a Kenyan child who has no sense of
touch. You must come back, no sense of touch, and it's blind. Now, educating a
child like that, when she is a citizen entitled to free and combusted basic
education, it's very challenging. Can you imagine? Can you guess how she's learning?
How is she learning? Using her tongue. Oh my gosh, that's really interesting. She was able to write a
message on the screen, and using her tongue, saying, I'm happy to meet the
minister for education. Oh, that's wonderful. And from there, I went to another one,
sponsored heavily by American Charitable Organizations, called Karibu Center for
young children, three to seven, coming from villages who don't have access to
technology, and they are now being taught on computers by insta and other
organizations. It's wonderful. So the focus now is on the form of education. I
came and found a law managing education in 1968, very tired now. Yes, we are replacing all that.
Yes, things change quickly. That is my primary focus. Legal platforms. Okay. For
management of education for the youth. Okay. So along those lines, how important do
you see education being for Kenya? For Kenya, education is everything. It's
everything. Without education, we can't promise the country anything at all,
because modern states have to have educated people, because otherwise you
can't even to operate an oven in a kitchen. If you are a cook or you are a house girl,
you need to know how to operate the machine to be able to run even an
electric iron for ironing, a shirt or a blouse. A child needs education to operate
even a single, single TV for purposes of news. You need education. You have to
operate the remote. And in any event, without education, our citizens, the
young generation, will not be able to relate to the wider world and we do not
want a semi-literate population that doesn't know where the boundaries of Kenya
are and so on. And we have other challenges like tribalism, corruption. We
have challenges like you have seen. Our cities are not as clean as we would want
them to be. Traffic challenges. I am convinced, without
doubt, that without basic education, and perhaps education leaning towards simple
things like technology, mathematics, how to operate a single tool, how to be able to
create things, then the country will be heavily disadvantaged as compared to the
other countries, because the globe now is just a village. After all, you are too
in the wild. And therefore, by interrogating the climate, you are merely
confirming my vision as Minister for Education that the world is now appellate.
And therefore, we must all relate together using ICT. And you can't use ICT if you are
not educated. Yes, absolutely. So along those lines, we've read a lot about the
under-seas cable that's come into Kenya, I think through Mombasa. That's very much,
I think, going to change the way that you can get banned with and get access to
the internet. How do you see that kind of computing really affecting students and
what they're going to need to know in the future? We have already finished phase one
of making sure that broadband is available to the greater number of schools in the country.
We have laid a fiber-outable cable to all the major cities and towns in the country.
Wow. We are now moving into phase two. And by the end of phase two,
which is what we are going to end by next year, 2030, broadband will be available
within the most reasonable distance for all schools in the country. I have now
the authority of our rural electrification authority that, by the end of this year,
all secondary schools in Kenya will be electrified. You do appreciate what that
means. Yes, that's big. I can give them access to the internet. I can give them
access to the wider world, and homework, and other studies, computer studies, and so on.
So it's a very fundamental thing. The cable is not at the Indian Ocean. It is already in our cities.
That's wonderful. That's wonderful. And the objective by next year is to make sure that
each school, preferably secondary and primary, they have access to broadband.
That's why so do we. The other thing that we're doing is encouraging the learning so
that our children can be able to learn. We are going to put our education
content, digitize it, and then put it in the sky, and then our child can learn
anywhere at any time. The other focus is to enable our children to be children.
I inherited a system where our children were going to school almost every day,
including Sunday, because of a confusion of curricula, the curriculum, and other
issues, you know, social economic issues. But we are developing a policy such that
our children, because you are only a child in Kenya, in the U.S. it's until you are 16.
Yeah, it's until you are 18. It's a very short time. Yes. The greater period of a
human life is when you are an adult. So we don't want either teachers or parents
or other busybodies to interfere with the right of our child to be a child. We want to
create a window for play for curricula activities like sports, music, and
talent development. So in addition to the reforms we are bringing forth, we are also
going to ensure that our curriculum also recognizes talent so that even a high
school student is a school prefect, or is very good in football, or is very good
in music, the final results, the final certificates it comes out with, should be
able to recognize that talent for what it is. God does not give all of us a
similar talent. You may be very good in mathematics, very good in biology or
geography, but you might also be, your brother, your sister, or peer in terms of
age, may be very good with music, or very good with, say, football, or even just
basic leadership. So that's another reform we are bringing on board, so that our
children, regardless of talent, are recognized for the talent that God has given them.
Yes, yes. Okay, and just one more question. So as we told you before we
started, we have 55,000 students in 20 countries, 850 classrooms following our
journey. Is there anything you would like to tell anyone who's following our
journey, just that we haven't covered, or any message you'd like to give students
and teachers around the world? It's very important for the world to know that
Canada has now recognized that real education must begin at Ali Chowdoo, not at
age 13 or 14, so on and so on. So we are, as a ministry, as a government, we are in
very serious focus, serious, very serious, on Ali Chowdoo, at least to age six, so
that we can give them an ICT background, understanding of these machines. We would
also like to have people like Bill Gates, be born in Kenya, or the people Manu
developed there, or even the late General Manu developed the iPhone. Yes,
after all, if the grandparents, the parents of President Obama was born in
Kenya, we can also produce Bill Gates, we can also produce Bill Gates. We are
focusing on the talent that we know, the genes that we know exists in this
country, so that we can develop a new generation to be able to take the country
to the next level. Minister, thank you very much, really appreciate your time,
thank you. It's a pleasure. Thank you.
