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The new general-duty police uniform was meant to be one of the visible symbols of a broader attempt to reform the National Police Service. Instead, within days of its unveiling, it became the subject of a political and public storm over who won the tender, how much the uniforms will cost taxpayers and whether the change was necessary in the first place. At the centre of the controversy is Nakuru-based textile manufacturer Bedi Investments Limited, the company the National Police Service says was awarded the contract to manufacture and stitch the new uniforms. Read more: https://t.co/ZJVPfaVDYE

David Ndii’s proposal to pull university funding completely out of the national budget and push it into a market-funded model is not economic genius. It is an ideological gamble with an entire generation. Education is not a private investment fund whose success should depend on whether capital markets find it attractive. Universities produce teachers, doctors, engineers, lawyers, researchers and scientists the human capital on which the economy itself depends. Treating that ecosystem as a commercial asset is a category error. The infrastructure proposal is equally troubling: move commercially generating utilities out of the budget and finance them through an infrastructure fund that raises money from the market. Fine capital markets can finance infrastructure. But the moment essential public services become primarily beholden to investors, the governing objective shifts from public value to financial return. Private capital has one fundamental obligation: returns to capital. Government has a different obligation: public welfare. Kenya already has a higher-education financing crisis. The current model has struggled badly, and even the government is now redesigning it. The answer cannot be to run away from public responsibility and hand the financing of education to the market. Ndii is not proposing a technical adjustment. He is proposing a philosophical transformation of the Kenyan state: turning public goods into investable assets and asking markets to determine what society can afford. That is the kind of policy that can look brilliant on a spreadsheet while destroying social mobility in the real world. You do not build a knowledge economy by making education hostage to the market. That is a generational fumble.