Is talk about fixing old schools taken seriously?

For years, the government has said traditional public schools across the country were going to be expanded and given a facelift. The promise was lauded as sound given the extreme levels of dilapidation that have turned most of these institutions into veritable death-traps.

However, months since the last repetition of this wonderful promise a noticeable cynicism has set in. It is easy to see why. The regurgitation by Ms Ketty Lamaro, permanent secretary, ministry of education and sports, last weekend did little to reassure largely because there has been a lot of talk, but hardly any follow-through action.

A month before the renewed commitment in May 2023, Parliament’s sessional committee on education had in April 2023 appropriated a modest allocation of Shs15 billion in the 2023/24 budget for the purpose amid some fanfare. The sum, of course, was absurd knowing how expensive construction can be in Uganda today.

The timing of the renewed pledge could also not have come at a worse time. Parliament was enacting the Anti-Homosexuality Bill, which is now law. Key development partners baulked at the popular legislation, whatever the credibility of their reasons, and suspended aid to new projects. The effect of that drastic reaction was several donor-funded social and infrastructure projects ground to a halt.

Many feared that one of the victims would be the multi-million-dollar Global Partnership for Education (GPE) project under which a concessionary credit facility from the World Bank was envisioned. The GPE is a flagship of the Education Partnership Compact (EPC) of 2022, which is an agreement between government and development partners to “strengthen a coordinated approach in transforming Uganda’s education system into an effective, efficient and equitable system.”

Setting out priority areas, policy reforms, sources of funding, etc, the EPC was born out of a mutual acknowledgement of the need to “unlock system bottlenecks that have led to persistent low learning outcomes in Uganda”. Infrastructure refurbishment and human resource (teachers) were identified as priority areas. But if the GPE facility has been frozen, then Ms Lamaro’s declarations can only be taken for misleading public policy bluster – which is dismaying.

Offering a conducive learning environment, and the need to increase enrolment in traditional schools, as the PS said, cannot be more urgent. Most of these schools have become disgraceful examples of how far the public school system has collapsed. Students there are condemned to a very poor quality of education from which they emerge mostly functionally illiterate, and in some cases traumatised by the experience.
 Trotting out fanciful promises that change is coming to public school soon may be politically expedient, but the credibility of government suffers when all there is to show for it is stasis.