The Government of Kenya, through the Ministry of Education, is concerned that the increased number of children born into poverty have become unmanageable, with no foreseeable solution at hand.
Following a spate of school fires that have become the staple food for school administrations in Kenya, the government now thinks that the underlying problem is the children of the poor who are hard to manage and have nothing to lose.
“You have not seen a single fire in any of the International Schools in Kenya. Only the Nyakeminchas of this country are burning their classrooms and dormitories. They have been conditioned to violence and disorder by their poor economic backgrounds, making it hard for them to sit comfortably in a classroom. They speak fluent violence.”
This conditioning and retardation is what makes children of the poor very hard to manage. In terms of investment, the government spends thousands of shillings educating them from the preschool years to high school, yet in the end they end up as jobless people who do not pay taxes or do meaningful economic activities. It is a huge loss to the government.
“By the time a child from a poor background turns 18, they have spent over KShs 12 million in terms of government resources. This is money that we cannot recoup because we are unable to tax them directly after that. The little VAT they pay is not enough to maintain the roads that they walk on because they rarely buy anything of value. We need to find an alternative use for them because this is a net loss to the country.”
Alternative Uses
While there is no economic case for bringing up the children of the poor, the government would want to explore other viable means that are steal ethical in the eyes of the rich.
“We are not talking about eating one year old babies although research has found them to be very nutritious. The government only wishes that we had enough uses for these primitives so as to extract some economic value from them. If we had huge, traditional coal mines, there would be a commercial case for them.”
