In Kenya, there is one certainty that is more solid than Mount Kenya: every time a light bulb is turned on in a public office, in a corridor or under the stairs of an institution, a ghost appears somewhere.
 
This time, it is not a colonial spirit wearing a helmet, or a warrior armed with a Masai shield and spear, but thousands of non-existent students, evanescent schools, and contributions that have taken the form of cosmic nothingness.

Yes, because here ghosts don't wait for Halloween: they already live in the records of the Ministry of Education.
There are hundreds, perhaps thousands of them: students who have never been to school, schools that have never seen a desk, numbers that exist only in Excel files. And now, with the great digital clean-up, the country risks suddenly losing up to 10% of its school population.
 
A demographic decline worthy of a horror movie, but without the special effects.
The principal secretary for basic education, Julius Bitok, says it with an almost endearing candor: yes, the number of schools will decrease, perhaps significantly, but don't ask him for the exact percentages, because those are still in the process of appearing. Or disappearing.
Meanwhile, four weeks into the last term, there are real schools—those with walls, desks, and real children—that have yet to see any funding. The result is that school life is limping along, like a matatu without fuel.
President Ruto, for his part, has decided to take a spectral approach to the issue: “We have ghosts everywhere — ghost schools, ghost students, ghost ghosts — and it's time to clean up.” These words sound reassuring, except that in this country, the term “clean up” is often translated as “sweep the dust under the rug.”
The verification operation, which was supposed to shed light on the gray areas, even had an almost poetic twist: an internet blackout over the weekend. So, for a couple of days, the ghosts were able to continue flitting undisturbed among the ministerial files.
Out of 32,000 primary, middle, and secondary schools, 20,000 passed the reality check and received funding. The others, evidently, were lost in the limbo of imaginary attendance. So far, 13 billion shillings have been distributed, but the government assures us that the process “is still ongoing.”
There remains the detail—not exactly irrelevant—that students, the flesh-and-blood ones, never receive the full amount that, on paper, they are entitled to: 15,043 shillings for middle school students, 22,244 for high school students. On paper, that is. In reality, the money travels like ghosts: it passes by, brushes against them, and vanishes.
A total of 13 billion shillings has been distributed: half of what was promised.
But, as always, the gap between theory and practice remains the same as that between the ministry's new blackboard and the broken piece of slate that children use in class.
And so, in a country where even education is plagued, the real subject to study remains the same: survival.