By Hilton Mwabili
National and County governments have been urged to consider empowering Youth polytechnics and other technical institutions as they hold potential to propel the country into industrialisation.
Makueni County Governor Prof. Kivutha Kibwana said in Mombasa that highly developed economies such as the Four Asian Tigers namely Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan- which were the first newly industrialised countries- relied largely on technical institutions as their source of skills.
“Many a time, youth polytechnics are looked down upon as places where failures and primary school dropouts are dumped to learn lowly ranked skills such as tailoring and carpentry but this attitude needs to be changed so that we begin viewing the institutions with seriousness because talking of Vision 2030, these institutions hold the future,” the Governor said.
Kibwana opined that polytechnics and technical institutions have capacity to churn out top technicians and engineers with quality skills to develop a country to the levels of developed countries like Japan and Singapore, “but this can only be achieved with proper motivation in terms of funding and equipment,” he noted.
According to Kibwana, while Kenyans admire prowess in construction works such as the Standard Gauge Railway (SGR) and Thika road- executed by civil engineers from China or Japan, they forget to understand that the skills sprouted from technical institutions similar to those they downplay locally.
