Education in Kenya Suffers at Hands of Shabab Extremists

Kenyan police officers stood guard at a meeting of teachers in Mandera. Insecurity has left a shortage of teachers as many refuse to work in the region.

By Isma'il Kushkush
Thursday, June 4, 2015

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MANDERA, Kenya — In a small classroom at Mandera Academy, a private school, posters with numbers, Swahili and English letters, and geometric shapes hung on the walls as dozens of students crammed together on small wooden desks.

Bilan Abdi, 9, stood up and spoke about her teacher, Violet Muranga, who was shot dead last year as she was dragged out of a bus with other victims while traveling to visit her family.

“We learned a lot from her,” Bilan said softly. “Songs like ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.’ ”

Kenya has suffered mightily at the hands of the Shabab, a Somali Islamist extremist group whose deadly attacks have left a painful void in this region’s schools.

Many of the 28 people killed on the bus, including Ms. Muranga, were teachers in the area heading home for Christmas break. Their deaths came around the same time as an attack at a mine in this northern corner of the country, where dozens of workers were separated by religion, forced to lie face down and shot dead.

Farther south, nearly 150 people, most of them students, were killed this year in April when militants stormed a university in the town of Garissa. It was the nation’s worst terrorist attack since the 1998 bombing of the United States Embassy in Nairobi.

The shock, fear and continued sense of insecurity have caused dozens of schools to close. More than 1,000 teachers from other parts of Kenya have refused to return to teach in areas where they fear terrorist attacks, according to the Kenyan National Union of Teachers, igniting an education crisis in those regions.

“Yes, I am concerned,” the cabinet secretary for education, Jacob Kaimenyi, recently told reporters in Nairobi, the capital. “Why are the children in those areas not learning? It is because of conflict. It is because of insecurity.”

Many of the qualified teachers, especially for secondary schools, come from other parts of Kenya, or “down country” as it is known here. They teach math, Swahili, English and science.

“We have advised teachers not to go back,” said Wilson Sossion, secretary general of the Kenyan National Union of Teachers. “They are subject to attacks.”

At the Mandera Secondary School for Boys, almost half of the 32 nonlocal teachers refused to come back.

Ibrahim Hassan, the head teacher, explained that the school was able to fill the gap by bringing back “some of the bright boys from last year” to teach.

But he added, “We are worried.”

Keeping school doors open can be hard enough, but there is a bigger challenge as well: preparing students for the national exam that determines a student’s eligibility for a university education.

“I want the teachers to come back,” said Mohamed Kala, 20, a nervous, final-year student at the school.

Many worry that the number of teachers who refuse to return to Kenya’s northeastern region will only increase. Here in Mandera County alone, there is a shortage of 600 teachers, in a region that already historically suffered from neglect and poor educational facilities. Only 10 percent to 15 percent of secondary students in this area score high enough on the national exam to qualify for a spot at a public university, according to local officials.

“You might not have a physics teacher in four years,” said Ismail Barrow, the Mandera County acting director of education, who has been in the temporary position for over a year.

“But the student has to sit for a physics K.C.S.E.,” he said, referring to the Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education examination. The exam is taken at the end of a student’s secondary education and determines access to a university.

Teachers say they are sensitive to the needs of their students, but many now fear for their lives.

“We choose life,” said Johnes Osoro of the North Eastern Down Kenya Teachers Association. “Many teachers are traumatized.”

Nyagaha Nicholas, 44, is the head teacher at Mandera Academy, which lost five teachers in the bus attack. He helped identify the bodies.

“I don’t want to remember,” he said. “The heads were shattered.”

“We are afraid, but we are supposed to be here,” he added. “The place is not secure at all.”

Public schools in Mandera have been hit the hardest. Schoolteachers are supposed to stay five years in a post before transferring, a requirement many now reject.

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