Government laptops to school joining kids

Are you kidding me? Well maybe not but then again I am very skeptical of this pre-election promise made by the president and his team. Though such a noble Idea I fail to see how it will come to be and if recent promises by the political class are anything to go by.

Let’s consider some metrics which play a huge role into whether this promise will come to pass or will simply be relegated into the abyss of oblivion just like its predecessors.

In order to see where my arguments stem, we can start by looking at the recent attempt by the government to go techy. This was during the registration of voters and the eventual voting process. A lot of hype went to the procurement process with talk of transparency issues in terms of how the procurement process was handled. The registration went on fine or so we were meant to believe and that was pretty much it.  During the Election Day the kits failed like they had a common brain and IEBC had to revert to the manual voter register; so much for technology. That failure meant that a 6 billion investment was thrown down the drain and we don’t know if the kits will be viable for another voting exercise.

I have never claimed to be a numbers junkie but a few numbers are clear here. The government spend 6 billion shillings to purchase 30,000 BVR kits (which technically were never used). Whatever that averages to, I don’t wanna go there. So moving on with that math, we need to ask ourselves. How many kids join school every year in Kenya or maybe we need to ask, how many don’t, because:- the area is under attack from God knows who, they don’t have food…..basically they lack the basic  supporting amenities that warrant a smooth learning experience.

So we now are halfway the first 100 days in office and I have a number of questions for you Mr. President. Will you give laptops to starving kids?  Will you give laptops to kids when their teachers are computer illiterate? Who will teach them? (Doing a 2 week course on computer packages doesn’t guarantee computer literacy!). How do you figure the security of the kids, their teachers and the laptops will be guaranteed? This and many other questions linger in my mind and possibly many a Kenya people minds. Whether this will be implemented or not remains yet to be known but one thing is for sure whichever way you look at it. It’s not practical, not in this term or the next!