House team to meet Secretaries on job creation

By ALPHONCE SHIUNDU

KENYA: A parliamentary committee has booked a date with four Cabinet Secretaries, as it seeks to get answers on government plans to address growing youth unemployed.

The Budget and Appropriations Committee chairman, Mutava Musyimi, said his team would meet the four Cabinet Secretaries to explore ways of creating jobs and wealth for the youth.

Those to appear before the committee include Adan Mohammed (Industrialisation), Henry Rotich (National Treasury), Ann Waiguru (Devolution) and Jacob Kaimenyi (Education). Mutava issued the notice to the Cabinet Secretaries. He further warned the Ministry of Education that there would be no more money for teachers in the next Budget and that the ministry should shift focus to building schools and laboratories, and setting up technical schools.

“In the next budget, we will not add more money in the education sector. We need to put money in sectors that create wealth, such as Agriculture and Information Communication and Technology,” explained Musyimi, the MP for Mbeere South.

Mutava spoke at a meeting in Nairobi’s County Hall that brought together the National Assembly’s Budget and Appropriations Committee; the Education, Science and Technology Committee; the Senate’s Finance, Commerce and Economic Affairs Committee and the Senate Committee on Education.

Social crisis

MPs who attended the meeting held on Thursday said the 200,000 children who will not join high school, plus hundreds of thousands of others who will not join university are recipe for socio-economic disaster, if they are not well equipped with skills.

The MPs said their date with the Cabinet Secretaries would seek ways to make sure that school dropouts leverage on their talents or are taken to polytechnics where they are equipped with skills that would allows them to earn a living. The lawmakers have threatened to stop pumping more money into the pay of teachers, when schooling infrastructure is lacking.

 “Why should we give them more money when we have millions of children who are dropping out of school?” posed Billow Kerrow, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Finance, Commerce and Economic Affairs.