Last week parliament tasked the education ministry with outlining punitive measures for schools that charge prohibitive fees.
This is
a perennial lament that pops up around the first term, when parents coming out of the merry making of the festive season, “suddenly” realise school fees are “too expensive”.
The representatives of the people jump on
the sentiment and criticise the government in general and the education
ministry, in particular for the high fees schools are charging.
This time they have gone a step further and
demanded that the education ministry punish schools, which charge exorbitant
fees.
You never know whether to laugh or cry in these
situations.
There are a number of issues here, not
least of all is how do you determine
what are exorbitant fees.
A man who was used to driving free of
charge on Entebbe road may think the sh5000 a trip on Entebbe expressway is
exorbitant; A man who is used to drinking a beer at his local Kafunda at sh3000
may scream bloody murder when he goes to one of our higher establishments and
they charge him sh10,000 for beer; A man used to paying sh1,000 in a taxi may
have some uncharitable words to say when the Uber driver charges him sh15,000
for the same trip into town.
Even more fundamentally, the MPs were not
calling for sanctions on government schools but on private schools, which
government ideally should have no business setting caps on what they charge as
fees.
"Putting a cap on fees will disincentivise investment in the sector and lead to the very thing MPs are complaining about – exorbitant fees...
About 10 million children are enrolled in
primary and secondary schools around the country. In Kampala 84 percent of them
are enrolled in private institutions. In the countryside this falls away considerably
depending on the earning power of the population.
If parliament wants to sustainably lower
school fees they need to take a long hard look at that ratio. That number
screams for more investment by government in the sector.
With the power to appropriate budgets, MPs
should be talking about increasing the funding to the sector to build, man and
equip more schools as a way to bring fees down.
It’s a simple demand and supply equation. The
more government schools there are of credible quality the less the gap for the
private schools to fill in.
In Sweden where government provides free education for every child of school going age, private schools account for less than a fifth of all enrolment.
