NGUGI: They’d love that we blame our poverty on the art subjects we studied at school
A resident checks water levels at the $380 million Itare Dam in Nakuru county, Kenya. The contractor has been paid $110 million yet the project stalled at just 30 per cent completion. PHOTO | FILE | NATION MEDIA GROUP
Why is Kenya poor? Why are we so far behind the Asian Tigers? According to Deputy President William Ruto, it is because our schools and universities teach history instead of science. This is not the first time Ruto has attributed our underdevelopment to teaching of social sciences.
In countries where the academia participates in shaping public debate and the national agenda, such an assertion would be immediately challenged and exposed as revisionism designed to bury a certain history, distort particular viewpoints, and make certain values obscure in order to weave a particular narrative.
