Soon, the current government will be on its way home after the incoming August polls.
Having been at the helm of Kenya’s top leadership, President Uhuru Kenyatta’s campaign had made a lot of promises to Kenyans.
One of them was to push for digital literacy programs, which included a promise that millions of pupils would get tablets for studies.
The project was to cost taxpayers more than USD 144 million. The plan was to issue 600K tablets to Class one pupils annually.
However, following a number of delays, quality concerns, and the expensive nature of the transaction, the project was abandoned in 2019.
The state then decided to use the funds for other projects, including the building of computer labs. This, according to experts, was supposed to have been done long before the ambitious tablet program was launched.
Still, it had also been reported that some of the tablets had been stolen from storage. The government did not do much to find the culprits, and the matter was soon forgotten.
Now, it would appear that some of the tablets meant for Kenyan pupils have been seen in Uganda. A retailer is selling them on Facebook marketplace for as low as KES 4000.
The tabs are equipped with Windows 10, and come with 64 GB of internal storage. According to the seller (named Emmanuel Watile), the tablets are ‘capable of all laptop plugins.’
Now, as expected, Kenyans are not happy with this development.
A Twitter user has since posted screenshots showcasing the sale. The engagement on the tweet is interesting, and points toward a population that is angry about false promises that could have genuinely helped millions of students.
The discussion can be seen in the linked tweet below.
