By Gitile Naituli
One of the quiet tragedies of Kenyan politics is how unfamiliar excellence has become. For so long, public office has been synonymous with theft, waste, and excuses that when a leader actually uses public money with discipline and imagination, the country responds not with emulation but with suspicion. “How is he doing it?” Kenyans now ask about Kiharu. “Where is the trick?” But there is no trick. There is only arithmetic, honesty, and the political will to serve.
Ndindi Nyoro’s school lunch programme in Kiharu has been treated as if it were some mysterious act of generosity. Yet when you strip away the cynicism and do the numbers, what remains is not a miracle but a lesson in how public finance is supposed to work.
Kiharu receives about KSh 182 million annually from the National Government Constituencies Development Fund (NG-CDF). The constituency has roughly 12,000 students in senior schools. When food is procured centrally and in bulk, maize, beans, rice, cooking oil, vegetables, the average cost of a meal drops dramatically. At that scale, the cost of feeding one student per day is about KSh 30. Over a 200-day school year, that is KSh 6,000 per student. Multiply by 12,000 students and the total annual feeding cost is KSh 72 million.
Now look at what parents are paying. Students are charged KSh 500 per term for lunch, KSh 1,500 per year. Multiply that by 12,000 students and you get KSh 18 million. Subtract that from the KSh 72 million total, and what remains is KSh 54 million. That is the amount that needs to be topped up from NG-CDF to guarantee every child in Kiharu a hot, reliable lunch at school.
KSh 54 million is just under 30 percent of Kiharu’s NG-CDF allocation of KSh 182 million. The law allows up to 40 percent of the fund to be used for bursaries and scholarships. In other words, Nyoro’s programme does not stretch the law. It does not even stretch the budget. It simply uses it.
Why, then, does this sound unbelievable to so many Kenyans? Because we have normalized mediocrity. We have lived so long under leaders who cannot account for a shilling that a leader who can account for millions seems suspicious. We have grown accustomed to MPs who use NG-CDF as a personal slush fund, building half-finished classrooms, awarding inflated tenders to friends, scattering bursaries as political bribes, so that the idea of a coherent, constituency-wide social programme feels alien.
What Nyoro has done is not radical. It is rational. School feeding is one of the highest-return investments a society can make. Children who eat concentrate better, stay in school longer, and perform better academically. Parents are relieved of an enormous burden. Girls, in particular, are less likely to drop out. Over time, the entire human capital of the constituency improves. That is how development actually happens, not through endless speeches about “uplifting the youth,” but through concrete policies that change daily life.
There is also a deeper political lesson here. In much of Kenya, politics is organized around ethnicity, grievance, and patronage. Leaders survive by mobilizing identity and fear, not by delivering results. In places like Central Kenya, however, a harsher standard often applies. MPs are expected to perform. They are replaced quickly when they do not. That is why Kiharu can have this conversation at all. Voters who demand results create leaders who produce them.
This is what some dismissively call “Kikuyu privilege.” But it is not privilege. It is accountability. The people of Kiharu are not genetically better. They are politically more demanding. They ask what their money is doing. They punish failure. That is a culture every region of Kenya can build if it chooses.
The real scandal is not that Nyoro can afford to subsidize school lunches. The scandal is that so many MPs cannot even tell you where their NG-CDF went. In some constituencies, hundreds of millions disappear into ghost projects, overpriced contractors, and political theatrics. Children still go hungry. Parents still struggle. Schools still beg. Then, when someone shows that it is possible to run a feeding programme for less than a third of the allocation, the response is disbelief.
Kenya does not lack money. It lacks seriousness. It lacks the basic discipline to treat public funds as sacred. We borrow billions, we tax a struggling population, and then we pretend that there is nothing left for education and health. Yet one MP, using the same legal framework as everyone else, can feed 12,000 children for a year with KSh 54 million. That is not magic. That is what happens when corruption is removed from the equation.
There is a final, uncomfortable truth here. Programmes like Kiharu’s expose other leaders. They show that the poverty of our schools is not inevitable. It is chosen. It is the product of priorities. When MPs would rather build monuments to themselves than invest in children, hunger becomes policy.
Kenyans should not be asking how Ndindi Nyoro does it. They should be asking why everyone else does not. The mathematics is clear. The law allows it. The money is there. What has been missing is the will. And perhaps that is why excellence now sounds like magic: because for too long, we have been governed by people who fear arithmetic more than they fear voters.