Kenya Secondary School Heads Association (KESSHA) stakeholders have warned that the government's delay in releasing school capitation on time will cause serious financial and operational issues for institutions across the country.
According to the former KESSHA chair, Kai Indimuli, who spoke during a public event on Sunday, July 27, the mounting debts in schools, due to decreasing and delayed capitation, will not only cripple school heads' ability to run the institutions effectively but will also lead some institutions to be auctioned.
Despite the Association penning a petition to parliament to see the capitation of schools being elevated, Indimuli claims that no action has been taken.
"Just before I exited service, we sat down together with other association heads and wrote a petition to parliament to show that since 2019, schools have been receiving less capitation and that at the time we were doing the petition, schools were owed Ksh68 billion," Indimuli said.
On the other hand, the Makueni KESSHA Chair, Johnstone Ndivo, said that the decreasing capitation will, at some point, contribute to students dropping out of schools and many institutions being closed.
"We were expecting this capitation to be enhanced, but instead we are hearing the pronouncement of decreased capitation, and we are foreseeing a situation where very soon we are going to see a big number of students dropping out of school," Ndivo said.
The announcement comes days after the Treasury Cabinet Secretary, John Mbadi, on Thursday, July 24, sparked a wave of controversy after he claimed that the government cannot sustain the full capitation to cater for free primary and secondary schools.
However, in a statement on Saturday, July 26, the Education Cabinet Secretary, Julius Ogamba, clarified that the government had not scrapped capitation for free primary and secondary school education but had instead reduced the capitation in this financial year.
According to the CS, the increased enrolment in secondary and primary schools in the country had contributed to the budgetary constraints.
Ogamba noted that free and compulsory education is a constitutional right for every child in the country, and his ministry will have an engagement with the national treasury to engineer strategies to allocate more resources to institutions.
"Under the government policy, the amount that we are supposed to give per student in senior school is Ksh22,244, but because of budget constraints, we have not been able to meet that target," Ogamba said.
“The number of students has been going up every year, but the figure has not been moving up. We have not abolished free primary education. We have only reduced the capitation fee," he added.
