- Learners in North Eastern are allegedly charged Sh100 each for games the State already funds at every tier.
- The money is said to move in cash up to county and regional directors, leaving no receipt and no audit trail.
- The Ministry concedes the allocation is inadequate. That is a case for the Treasury, not a warrant to bill a pastoralist household.
Every first term the athletics season opens. Every second term ball games follow. Across North Eastern, schools name their teams. Sources in the regional education sector say something else is drawn up alongside the team sheet. A collection roster.
Each senior and junior learner is allegedly asked for Sh100, the totals computed against NEMIS enrolment figures, the same register the State uses to send those schools public money. The database that entitles a child to free education is allegedly being used to invoice that child for it.
Cash, no receipts
The chain flows upwards. School heads are pressured to raise the levy and hand it over in cash to their County Directors of Education. The directors aggregate a county figure and pass it to the Regional Director, where it is said to be shared among field officers.
The cash matters more than the amount. It leaves no receipt, no vote head, no audit trail. Section 29 of the Basic Education Act, 2013 forbids collecting any levy without an official receipt. Such a chain would sit beyond the reach of both the school auditor and the Auditor-General.
Heads who hesitate are allegedly warned their accounts will be frozen. That power exists to protect public money. Used as leverage for undocumented payments, a safeguard becomes a threat.
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The state has already paid
In June 2026, under Basic Education Principal Secretary Julius Bitok, the Ministry issued guidelines on co-curricular activities. Parents, they state, should not be required to finance these programmes: funding is already catered for through government allocations and approved partnerships, making any further levy unnecessary and unacceptable.
The guidelines assign responsibilities at sub-county, county, regional and national level: transport, meals, facilitation of teachers and officials, venue management, security, first aid, accommodation, event coordination. Every cost a games levy could claim to cover is on that list, against a tier and a budget holder.
Who holds those budgets? Co-Curricular Activities Committees at each level, chaired by the relevant Director of Education. They plan, budget, monitor and supervise.
The officers alleged to be collecting cash are, by the Ministry’s own design, the officers already holding the money.
In 2025, Education Cabinet Secretary Julius Ogamba confirmed the Ministry retains part of capitation before it reaches schools, Sh40 per learner in primary and Sh500 in secondary, precisely for coordination at sub-county, county and regional levels.
So a household in Wajir has already paid for regional coordination, and already paid for the activity at school. Asked for a further Sh100 at the gate, it is not filling a gap. It is paying a third time.
An admission is not a licence
There is a defence being made quietly in the field, and it deserves an answer.
The Ministry has admitted the money is thin. Mr Ogamba himself put the co-curricular allocation under Free Primary Education at Sh76 per learner a year and called it inadequate. He pointed to Treasury delays. No school, the argument runs, can mount a games season on Sh76. Somebody must make up the difference.
The premise is true; the conclusion does not follow
An admission of underfunding is a confession, not a delegation. When a Cabinet Secretary says the vote is too small, he is describing a failure at the Exchequer, not handing a taxing power to a County Director of Education. Section 29(2)(b) requires his prior written approval for any levy. A remark about scarcity is not that, and no field officer may convert it into one.
Nor does the right bend to the fiscal year. Article 53(1)(b) does not read “free and compulsory basic education, subject to disbursement”. If scarcity licensed collection, no right in the Constitution would survive a tight quarter.
Then consider who pays. A shortfall carried on the national budget costs each of us little. The same shortfall recovered at a school gate in Mandera falls on the household least able to carry it and likeliest to answer by keeping the child at home. That is not a funding solution. It is a State failure transferred onto the poorest learner the State has.
The Ministry has settled this itself. The June 2026 guidelines name the funding streams and ban the levy in the same document. Whoever is collecting has read one line and skipped the other.
A shortfall argues for a bigger vote. It does not print a receipt.
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Where it bites hardest
Elsewhere this would be an accountability story. In North Eastern it is an enrolment story.
Mandera carries the highest share of out-of-school children in Kenya at 27.2 per cent, against a national average of 9. Wajir stands at 19. Form One transition has needed repeated administrative rescue: Garissa sat at 88 per cent in late January 2024, reaching 99.6 per cent only after chiefs were told to trace missing learners.
Nationally, 85.7 per cent of surveyed schools send learners home over unpaid illegal levies. Forty-five per cent of parents know a child who stayed home because the family could not pay.
For a pastoralist household, Sh100 across four children is not an inconvenience. It is the push from enrolment towards withdrawal. These are the learners the games ladder exists to reach.
What must be done
Denials will not settle this. Four things will.
One. Audit activity-fee collections independently, at every tier from sub-county to region.
Two. Publish what each Co-Curricular Activities Committee was allocated and what it spent. The Ministry has named the committees; let it name the figures.
Three. Review every account-freezing directive issued to a school head in the region these past three years.
Four. If Sh76 is genuinely too little, say so in a budget request, not at a school gate.
Kenya has spent two decades convincing marginalised communities that public education carries no price tag. That message is undone fastest where the trust was won last.
The games open again next term. The question is who pays for them, and who keeps the change.
By Ibrahim Adan
Mr Adan writes on education policy.
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