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DP Leader Justin Muturi<\/p>\nDP Leader Justin Muturi<\/p>\n
Democratic Party (DP) leader and former Attorney
\nGeneral Justin Muturi says that Rigathi Gachagua\u2019s criticism of North Eastern
\nleaders has awakened calls for accountability.<\/p>\n
Muturi said elected leaders from the Northern
\ncounties are now under siege from their own voters to account for the resources
\nreceived since the commencement of devolution.<\/p>\n
He said Gachagua\u2019s recent remarks on
\nsecondary school placement detonated a debate Kenya has long avoided with
\npolite silence.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat began as an uncomfortable observation
\nabout who gets into which schools has become a national reckoning about
\ninequality, regional leadership, and the quiet architecture of privilege that
\ndevolution was supposed to dismantle,\u201d the DP leader said.<\/p>\n
In a statement issued on Monday, Muturi, who
\nalso served as Speaker of the National Assembly between 2013 and 2022, said the
\nreaction from North Eastern Kenya has been especially telling.<\/p>\n
\u201cFar from rejecting his words, many
\nresidents have embraced them, turning their frustration not against Mount
\nKenya, but against their own leaders who have presided over abundance in
\nNairobi while villages back home remain trapped in scarcity.\u201d<\/p>\n
Gachagua\u2019s intervention, according to the
\nDP leader, forced the country to confront an inconvenient truth that regional
\ninequality in education is no longer primarily about colonial neglect.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is increasingly about contemporary
\ngovernance failure. North Eastern counties have received billions of shillings
\nthrough devolution. Constituency Development Funds, county budgets, and
\nnational equalisation transfers have flowed with unprecedented volume,\u201d Muturi
\nsaid.<\/p>\n
He added, \u201cYet the number of competitive
\npublic secondary schools in those regions remains painfully low. The result is
\nthat even talented students struggle to qualify for national placement because
\nthe local institutional ecosystem is weak.\u201d<\/p>\n
Muturi argued that what has changed is not
\njust money; it is the politics of responsibility, and that devolution was
\ndesigned to transfer not only resources, but also accountability.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen leaders in Garissa, Mandera, Wajir,
\nor any other county spend most of their political lives in Nairobi hotels,
\nparliamentary corridors, and political salons, they abandon the very
\ncommunities that elected them.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cSchools are not built by
\nspeeches. Laboratories do not appear through press conferences. Teachers are
\nnot trained by social media posts. These things happen when leaders stay home
\nlong enough to make them happen,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
The former AG said Gachagua may have lit
\nthe fuse, but the explosion belongs to the people and that North Eastern
\nresidents are no longer begging Nairobi for sympathy but are demanding answers
\nfrom their own representatives<\/p>\n
\u201cWhile rural schools lack electricity,
\nleaders drive convoys through the same dusty roads without ever asking why the
\nschools are still dark. This is what political economists call elite
\ninsulation, the ability of those in power to escape the consequences of their
\nown failure. When leaders do not use public schools, they feel no urgency to
\nimprove them.\u201d<\/p>\n
Muturi argued that education is not charity
\nand that a Kenyan child in Wajir is not less deserving of a physics lab than a
\nKenyan child in Nyeri.<\/p>\n
\u201cEquality of citizenship demands equality
\nof local effort as well as national support. Devolution was a covenant: the centre
\nwould send money, and the regions would build capacity. Too many leaders have honoured
\nonly the first half.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"DP Leader Justin Muturi Democratic Party (DP) leader and former Attorney
General Justin Muturi says that Rigathi Gachagua\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":19554,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[80,351,352,98,100,353,101,350,99],"class_list":{"0":"post-19553","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-kenya","8":"tag-kenya","9":"tag-kenya-news","10":"tag-star","11":"tag-star-news","12":"tag-star-news-kenya","13":"tag-star-newspaper-kenya","14":"tag-the-star","15":"tag-the-star-kenya","16":"tag-the-star-newspaper"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19553","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19553"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19553\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19554"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19553"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19553"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19553"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}