Civic Education: Getting it Right

My article the other day entitled “Civic education could still go quite wrong if the whole truth is not told” (DN 4th August 2011) elicited all manner of interest. Some people asked where this education i was talking about was, while others said that i was slighting the role that civil society has historically played to bridge the knowledge gap left on citizens by the government. People have a right to their opinion, and i respect those rights. I won’t even defend myself or try to answer the many queries. I as well work for civil society and i have been engaged in civic education for over 15 years now. This is an overdue discussion, and I am happy that it’s on. I want to respond to one challenge: what are the solutions to the problems that have beset civic education?

There are many theories of community education and development, many models of practice, many shades of success and how it is measured. Civic education has been said to be necessary for developing a democratic culture, for good governance, for cohesion and national development. All these theories and terminologies that have for the last two decades surrounded civic education are indeed as misleading as they are vain; i am convinced that they have been part of the lie, a big part of the 47 years of national disempowerment of Kenyans. Why? Because if this was the case, we would not have witnessed the current increase in disparities between households in Kenya.

One reader wanted to know why there has not been civic education at the Coastal region – amid the poverty, the apathy, the illiteracy, the land issues, the insecurity, the complacency of the population and the impunity of state actors. There is the frustration here, just like we know of the warped logic of the Turkana, who in frustration, say “we are the barbed wire of Kenya”. There is clearly an ideological frustration of educators and CSOs that carry out civic education, and there is frustration of people in rural Kenya who have ideally been left alone to their own devises with “the government” coming in as a machinery for oppression and aggravation .

Where should civic education come from? Nairobi? Government Ministries? No. It should not, and it clearly will not. And if there is ever a pretension that it does, it will be superficial (and ONLY dealing with awareness), it will not rooted in community dynamics, it will not communicative of the needs and aspirations of the people, it will be empty (with no resonance to the psyche of the people) and then, it will return to wherever it came from – in bags of the Government operatives or civil society groups. Now, this is NOT civic education.

I say it is not civic education because the residual impact is negligible: the implementation is both temporal and spasmodic; the purpose is determined else and the results are only looked at from the immediate. You will find them written all over in monitoring reports by CSOs, donors and government departments, but you will hardly hear them mentioned by the local people. There are classic examples of CDF reports given by MPs and outcome reports given to donors that people hardly get to either know or attest to.

How many people are aware that by adopting the Sessional Paper no 10 of 1965, the government condemned certain areas to poverty and neglect? Now, who expects the government to tell the people of Turkana, North Eastern and parts of the Coast region that they do not plan for development with them in mind? Thank God there is the County Governments coming up and the Equalisation Fund has been established by the Constitution of Kenya 2010.

A police officer will not be interested to tell you about your rights since if you know you may not allow yourself to be victimised. A headmaster may not tell parents that it is their right to seek full disclosure of decentralised funds because this may work against his/her plans. And this has something to do with the national psyche we have developed over time: we hide behind blades of grass like the proverbial dog. Surprisingly, we, most times, manage not to be seen – indeed a particularly Kenyan quality that is rare elsewhere.

Civic education in my view is a citizen led process, a process by which citizens discuss, adopt and carry out certain actions at the individual and collective level to better the way they are governed. It can be initiated by citizen groups and individuals in reference to a particular issue (and NOT the grandiose panorama of concepts and abstract terms we are treated to). Civic education resonates with an issue that is at the heart of a community – like the lack of medicine at the local clinic or a potholed road. On the issue, a citizen has the responsibility to find out how much money was allocated to medicine, who the responsible person is, how much of the medicine was brought, how many people have been treated, what the balance is and where it is kept.

Hardly will citizens get this information easily. There will be resistance. Neither will the government (police/administration/ministry) like or be friendly to the citizen who asks such questions. But the moment one starts telling their family, friends and workmates about it, this is the beginning point of civic education. When then people around you start seeing the connection between the lack of medicine and corruption, the lack of service and the inefficiency of their governance system, the link between a bad low and the lack of accountability; citizens are getting to know what ails their society. The moment the p move a demand to be told what happens at the hospital (and it may take long for this to happen), this now is civic responsibility. A process of this nature is a civic education experience gone towards civic engagement.

Granted, the problem of illiteracy exists in many parts of the country, and especially illiteracy of the civic sense; yes this is the cause for a lack of connectivity by citizens of and ID card and their civic duty; yes it is the cause of an attitude of complacency towards life; yes it is the cause of fear and reverence for government and leaders; i agree. But you don’t need to be literate to know that you were not given medicine in hospital. Civic education (the one i described above) is not a solution to this. It is the next step.