- Kennedy Buhere challenges Benjamin Sogomo’s argument that education leadership requires basic education management experience.
- He cites past ministers and senior officials from outside education who drove major sector reforms.
- Buhere argues effective leadership rests on vision, courage, sound judgement and trust in technical experts.
Former Chief Executive Officer of the Teachers Service Commission (TSC), Mr Benjamin Sogomo, has said that the replacement of Principal Secretary for the State Department for Basic Education Prof Julius Bitok with Mr John Olooltua, a career educationist, is God-sent.
“This is because for the last 25 years, the department has largely been run by either professors from the universities or civil servants without training experience in the management of basic education,” he noted.
In an article in Education News, edition of July 20-August 10, 2026, entitled How bad leadership choices have messed up education reforms at MoE, Sogomo said that people tend to pay attention to what they understand best because they get comfort in working in their area of excellence.
Mr Sogomo is grossly mistaken on four counts.
Firstly, the alleged bad policy decisions that the Ministry has successively been pursuing were not because it was led by “professors from the universities or civil servants without training experience in the management of basic education.”
Secondly, President Ruto’s decision to replace Bitok with Olooltua may have had less to do with Olooltua’s “training experience in the management of basic education” than with his proven general management and leadership experience in the dockets he held before moving to MoE.
Thirdly, we have had some of the best leaders as Ministers and Permanent/Principal Secretaries of (basic) education in the last 25 years. Some of the most potentially transformative policy decisions the Ministry is pursuing today were made by Ministers and PSs with little or no “training experience in the management of basic education.”
Non-educationists who shaped education
The Civil Service provided the pool from which Kenyatta, Daniel arap Moi and Mwai Kibaki selected the Permanent Secretaries (today’s Principal Secretaries) to head Ministries. Most of the people who headed the MoE in the 1960s were seasoned civil servants. They were responsible for the excellent primary school education those who were born in the 60s enjoyed.
Prof Saitoti and Prof Karega Mutahi steered the establishment of Free Primary Education and Free Day Secondary Education (FPE and FDSE) as Minister and Permanent Secretary, respectively.
It was Prof Sam Ongeri and Prof James Ole Kiyiapi who introduced admission of learners into secondary schools based on whether they attended public or private primary schools. Before then, private primary schools with an enrolment of less than 30 per cent were taking over 70 per cent of the available Form One places in then National and elite Provincial Secondary schools. It took a medical doctor and an environmental expert to address the imbalance.
The late Mutula Kilonzo fought holiday tuition and remedial teaching, against resistance from the very teachers who should know the basis of school holidays and remedial teaching in the education of learners.
Prof Jacob Kaimenyi stopped exorbitant secondary school fees through the Kilemi Mwiria Task Force on Secondary School Fees. The current ceilings in capitation and fees paid by households were the work of Kaimenyi, a medical doctor. Similarly, Kaimenyi banned ranking of students in national examinations, a grossly stupid policy that had zero educational value given the unequal endowments of schools.
Dr Fred Matiang’i cracked down on the brazen cheating in national examinations. Curriculum delivery and administration of national examinations are in the hands of educationists. It is school administrators and other powerful interests who made a fool of Kaimenyi during the 2015 examination debacle — a forthright and honest man.
Dr Amina Mohamed similarly tried to stop the brazen violation of the instructional or class hours as stipulated in Section 84 of the Basic Education Regulations, 2015. She did this after establishing that over-teaching was one of the features that caused students to cause trouble in schools.
Amina also introduced half-term for learners in primary schools, arguing that it was incongruous to let learners in secondary school go for half-term but deny their young siblings the same opportunity.
The policy decisions were well-intentioned. They addressed core issues of education: access, equity and proper delivery of the curriculum. All steered by non-educationists.
Leadership goes beyond technical expertise
Suffice it to say that you don’t need to be an educationist to be the main bull or cow in Jogoo House. Any Kenyan who has had an excellent education — in this case, post-secondary education — can provide first-rate leadership to the sector.
Why? Leaders do not need expert skills in the specific field they have been appointed to manage or lead.
The main job is to guide people, manage big goals and build strong teams. The greatest strength a person brings to the leadership of an organisation is curiosity and courage. He asks questions because he is inquisitive. He confronts persistent problems because he or she has courage. Expertise never gave anybody courage.
A leader is not God. That is why he asks questions and then listens, not to plausible explanations, but to answers to the questions, bottlenecks, problems and challenges facing the organisation.
You don’t need to be an expert to frame the questions. This is because what holds back an organisation are not technical issues but lack of vision, focus and the insidiousness of vested interests — threats from within and without an organisation.
To win the trust of technical staff, they should be able to help the leader understand where they are, in the light of the overarching vision and purpose of the ship called either a Ministry or a State Department.
A good leader focuses on human skills and strategy. They let trained workers handle the technical choices. The focus is on the cathedral and not the stones which build the cathedral.
Technical issues are for the middle echelons of the organisation and entry-level positions in the Ministry. But at the upper echelons, once you’re at the top, your expertise in a specific field is less relevant. It can be an impediment.
“Leaders who come up an expertise track almost always derail here, because they react to the challenge by relying on their core strengths: high intelligence and the capacity for hard work,” Wanda Wallace, president and CEO of coaching and consulting firm Leadership Forum, and David Creelman, CEO of human capital management firm Creelman Research, write in Harvard Business Review about how leaders deal with not being an expert anymore.
It doesn’t matter whether you rise up in the ranks of an organisation in your area of expertise or get promoted into responsibilities in areas outside your expertise. Your job is to inspire trust, provide the tools and other resources your subordinates need to succeed, apart from setting goals or ends to achieve within set timelines or as a going concern.
Olooltua must lead as a generalist
The expert leader within the sector in which he has training and experience must resist looking at the technical aspects of the operation. If he gets involved, that is meddling or abandoning his responsibilities of leadership.
An admiral in the U.S. Navy, Hyman G. Rickover, once observed that the job of a leader is to solve problems that subordinates bring up to him. He should use his own judgement to discern latent problems that might be impeding an organisation from achieving its goals.
Whatever the problem, he must ask questions and listen to the experts as they brainstorm in understanding the problem(s). It is he who eventually gives direction and takes responsibility for the actions taken to solve the problem(s).
He must, however, support the experts in two ways. Give them free room, bring the problems to the table for thoughtful discussion, make the decision, and give them the moral and material support to execute the decision without meddling from any quarter.
PS Olooltua must resist the temptation to look at the policy challenges in the sector from a professional teacher’s perspective. Some of the challenges facing the sector are persistence of poor reading proficiency among learners in Grade Four and above, inequitable financing of schools, unwieldy school sizes, especially in C1 and C2 schools, hurried syllabus coverage against educational policy, cheating in national examinations, disproportionate numbers of learners who score D and below in KCSE, shortage of teachers in some categories of schools and regions, and indiscipline and unrest in secondary schools, among others.
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Mr Sogomo, subject matter mastery or pedagogical knowledge has zero value to whoever is, for the time being, steering the sails of the ship of education.
One needs a generalist leadership style. Nothing more and nothing less.
By Kennedy Buhere
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