By Fredrick Odiero
Kenya National Union of Teachers (KNUT) Kisumu East branch is locked in a row over the supply of Competence Based Curriculum (CBC) materials.
The union through its Executive Secretary Mr. David Obwon is claiming that contracted suppliers of CBC books to schools blatantly ignored the policies directed by the Ministry of Education.
Speaking in Kisumu town, Obwon said that since the inception of Free Primary Education in the year 2003, all primary schools have been purchasing instructional materials and that book booksellers would deliver the same to schools before being paid.
He insisted that policy has never changed ever since and wondered why the
sudden twist of events.
Obwon said that due to regime change and in order to better the supply of books to schools, the Ministry of Education changed the policy by
centralizing the supply of books from the Kenya institute of curriculum
development (KICD).
He said there are contracted suppliers by KICD who have developed and
are executing their own policies by overstraining the head teachers to
further incur expenses of collecting and transporting to their
individual schools.
‘They centralized their delivery points to Sub county education
offices contrary to alive issued by the Director,KICD’ he said..
He noted that this is a tendency that must be condemned in the strongest
term possible as it amounts to rule of jungle.
‘We cannot allow our head teachers to be intimidated and harassed to
collect the books from far off stations putting them to risk any damages
thereafter.’ He said.
Obwon noted that in a number of occasions, some schools have never
received some textbooks simply because the suppliers dumped the books
and left without verification.
He said the flagship curriculum, CBC, under implementation is at stake
since the books being supplied at the moment are for the pioneer grade 6
pupils/ candidates.
He said the government should let the suppliers do the right things.
“We also advise our headteachers to insist on books being delivered
to their stations as they risk the burden of proof,” he said.
