Kenya cannot afford to pour billions of shillings into education through a system that cannot reliably tell how many children are actually in school.
The latest audit findings on NEMIS expose a credibility crisis that should alarm the government.
Schools with hundreds of genuine learners missing from the system have been denied millions, while others have received money for pupils who are no longer on their rolls.
This is not a minor administrative glitch. It is a direct threat to the proper use of public money and, more importantly, to children whose education depends on adequate resources.
The glaring discrepancies are particularly troubling because similar problems have been flagged before.
The revelation that hundreds of thousands of ghost learners have previously been identified, alongside cases of non-existent schools and inflated enrolments, raises an obvious question: why has the government failed to fix the system?
The Ministry of Education must urgently reconcile NEMIS records with actual enrolment and establish responsibility for persistent discrepancies.
Schools cannot be allowed to benefit from inflated numbers, while legitimate institutions are starved of funds because their learners are missing from a government database.
Every shilling allocated for education must follow a real learner. Anything less is an unacceptable betrayal of both taxpayers and Kenya’s children.
Quote of the Day:“We have the means and the capacity to deal with our problems, if only we can find the political will.”—Ghanaian diplomat and seventh secretary general of the United Nations Kofi Annan died on August 18, 2018
