DP Leader Justin Muturi
Democratic Party (DP) leader and former Attorney
General Justin Muturi says that Rigathi Gachagua’s criticism of North Eastern
leaders has awakened calls for accountability.
Muturi said elected leaders from the Northern
counties are now under siege from their own voters to account for the resources
received since the commencement of devolution.
He said Gachagua’s recent remarks on
secondary school placement detonated a debate Kenya has long avoided with
polite silence.
“What began as an uncomfortable observation
about who gets into which schools has become a national reckoning about
inequality, regional leadership, and the quiet architecture of privilege that
devolution was supposed to dismantle,” the DP leader said.
In a statement issued on Monday, Muturi, who
also served as Speaker of the National Assembly between 2013 and 2022, said the
reaction from North Eastern Kenya has been especially telling.
“Far from rejecting his words, many
residents have embraced them, turning their frustration not against Mount
Kenya, but against their own leaders who have presided over abundance in
Nairobi while villages back home remain trapped in scarcity.”
Gachagua’s intervention, according to the
DP leader, forced the country to confront an inconvenient truth that regional
inequality in education is no longer primarily about colonial neglect.
“It is increasingly about contemporary
governance failure. North Eastern counties have received billions of shillings
through devolution. Constituency Development Funds, county budgets, and
national equalisation transfers have flowed with unprecedented volume,” Muturi
said.
He added, “Yet the number of competitive
public secondary schools in those regions remains painfully low. The result is
that even talented students struggle to qualify for national placement because
the local institutional ecosystem is weak.”
Muturi argued that what has changed is not
just money; it is the politics of responsibility, and that devolution was
designed to transfer not only resources, but also accountability.
“When leaders in Garissa, Mandera, Wajir,
or any other county spend most of their political lives in Nairobi hotels,
parliamentary corridors, and political salons, they abandon the very
communities that elected them.”
“Schools are not built by
speeches. Laboratories do not appear through press conferences. Teachers are
not trained by social media posts. These things happen when leaders stay home
long enough to make them happen,” he added.
The former AG said Gachagua may have lit
the fuse, but the explosion belongs to the people and that North Eastern
residents are no longer begging Nairobi for sympathy but are demanding answers
from their own representatives
“While rural schools lack electricity,
leaders drive convoys through the same dusty roads without ever asking why the
schools are still dark. This is what political economists call elite
insulation, the ability of those in power to escape the consequences of their
own failure. When leaders do not use public schools, they feel no urgency to
improve them.”
Muturi argued that education is not charity
and that a Kenyan child in Wajir is not less deserving of a physics lab than a
Kenyan child in Nyeri.
“Equality of citizenship demands equality
of local effort as well as national support. Devolution was a covenant: the centre
would send money, and the regions would build capacity. Too many leaders have honoured
only the first half.”