Former CS Muturi weighs in on senior school admissions debate

Former Attorney General Justin Muturi says the country does not need a new formula of admissions into senior secondary schools but rather a political ethic that forces leaders to live with the consequences of their governance.

In a statement released on Monday, the former Cabinet Secretary said former Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua’s recent remarks on secondary school placement detonated a debate Kenya has long avoided with polite silence.

According to Muturi, what began as an uncomfortable observation about who gets into which schools has become a national reckoning about inequality, regional leadership, and the quiet architecture of privilege that devolution was supposed to dismantle.

“When governors’ children attend the same public schools as villagers’ children, laboratories will be built. When MPs depend on local hospitals, those hospitals will be equipped. When leaders are rooted in their communities rather than hovering above them, inequality will finally begin to shrink,” he said, adding:

“Until then, school placement will continue to expose what Kenyan politics tries to hide: that the greatest barrier to equal opportunity is not geography, but a political class that has learned how to abandon its own people while speaking in their name.”

Muturi said the reaction from North Eastern Kenya has been especially telling and, far from rejecting Gachagua’s words, many residents have embraced them, turning their frustration not against Mount Kenya, but against their own leaders who have presided over abundance in Nairobi while villages back home remain trapped in scarcity.

In Kenya, he said, secondary school placement is one of the most powerful allocators of future opportunity.

National schools, extra-county schools, and well-resourced institutions function as ladders into elite universities, professional careers, and political networks and to control access to them is to quietly shape the next generation of Kenya’s ruling class.

“Gachagua’s intervention forced the country to confront an inconvenient truth: regional inequality in education is no longer primarily about colonial neglect. It is increasingly about contemporary governance failure,” Muturi noted.

He said North Eastern counties have received billions of shillings through devolution but little can be seen on the ground.