By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

Had the editors of the so-called Herald Newspaper competently read and fully digested the quite straight-forward and limpid contents of Mr. John Burnett’s article, which was originally broadcast on America’s National Public Radio (NPR), they would not have attempted to make such epic fools of themselves and become a global embarrassment to all levelheaded and patriotic Ghanaians (See “Red Alert: Akufo-Addo Wanted in Kenya” Ghanaweb.com 11/16/12).

Indeed, contrary to what the editors of the Herald Newspaper would have their readers believe, what the Texas-based Mr. Burnett actually says in both his broadcast and article is that while the Mwai Kibaki-minted fee-free public educational policy has not been perfect, and this is only to be expected, since no human establishment or institution is perfect, nevertheless, the new fee-free Kenyan public educational system is far better than what prevailed in that great East-African country before 2003, when President Kibaki promised and instituted the current regime.

For instance, a 50-year-old woman called Agnes Munuhe is quoted to be telling the following heartbreaking story: “I come from a very poor family such that I was always coming home [to collect] school fees.” Readers are further apprised of the quite characteristic, albeit decidedly bleak and dismal, fact of Ms. Munuhe having been born 11th out of 13 children to a subsistence farmer father and his three wives.

What the preceding means, of course, is that Ms. Munuhe, who is now gainfully employed as a “Teachers’ Adviser,” would most likely have ended up exactly like her own mother and/or any one of the latter’s co-wives or rivals; and that is, economically deprived and intellectually and culturally destitute and malnourished, but for the magical rescue and rare privilege of a Western-type of formal education. Of course, Ms. Munuhe, at 50, is rather too old to have personally and/or directly benefited from President Kibaki’s 2003-implemented fee-free public education.

Still, what is auspiciously certain is the fact that with the highly successful implementation of Mr. Kibaki’s fee-free educational policy, the generation born after Ms. Munuhe, including the latter’s own children and younger relatives, has not had to suffer the kind of desultory and/or fitful and excruciatingly painful academic career endured by author Burnett’s Kenyan case in point.

Even more telling of the rather fabulous success story of the fee-free Kibaki public educational policy, is the following statement from the U.S.-based Mr. Burnett: “Because her parents could not always afford the fees, [Ms.] Munuhe didn’t learn to read and write until she was 16 and did not finish high school until she was 25. When Kenya dropped school fees the result was dramatic. Public school enrollment went from 6.1 million to 7.4 million in just two years, from 2002 to 2004, and has continued climbing. The increase has included many girls whose families had held them back in this conservative society.” I mean, what is so adamantinely difficult for the Herald Newspaper editors to appreciate about this great Kenyan fee-free public education success story?

Furthermore, we are told that “A decade ago, many of these [fee-free school attending] kids might not have been in school. They would have been hauling water, tending sheep or working in farm fields. Still Kenya’s nine-year-old experiment with free education is not working out as people had hoped.” What a delightful paradox! In other words, while just like the U.S. public educational system, the latter’s Kenya’s fee-free counterpart could be significantly improved, what Mr. Burnett clearly appears to be saying strikingly approximates the old maxim that: “Half a loaf is far better than no loaf at all.”

Needless to say, if a fee-free public education, even “under trees,” were that indescribably bad, why has President Mahama not made it his major policy agenda by immediately calling for the halting of the practice in the northern half of the country?

In sum, this is clearly the kind of “political expediency” that Ghanaian voters ought to worry about in the frenzied lead-up to Election 2012. For, fundamentally speaking, about the only largely teething problem that America’s Mr. Burnett finds with the Kibaki fee-free educational policy is that it was not adequately planned and implemented.

Needless to say, there is absolutely nowhere in the world where educational reforms are known or said to have taken off in a perfect shape or form. And did Mr. Burnett also bother to honestly tell his listeners and readers that even here in the “picture-perfect United States,” public schoolchildren and their parents have had sell chocolate candies freely donated by community service-oriented private companies, every semester or term, in order to supplement the official school budget?

*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
Nov. 16, 2012
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