As Kenya debates growth of performing arts and concept of creative economy following the ban of a play by Butere Girls High that headlined this year’s edition of Secondary Schools Drama Festival, the discourse has widened to rope in President William Ruto and Frist Lady Rachel Ruto, who is the patron of the western Kenya-based school.

Hitherto, President Ruto had said nothing about the play and school his wife is patron of. His acolytes, though, who include cabinet secretaries and members of parliament have been vociferous in cannonballing creative arts curriculum.

Butere High School is a stand-out centre of excellence that for over 100 years has a reputation of rolling out outstanding academics in law, education, medicine, engineering, sports and creative arts at every education cycle.

Coincidentally, on the day Butere Girls High School play ruffled the government, Nigeria banned musician Eedris Abdulkareem’s song Tell Your Papa that is critical of President Bola Tinubu and his administration. Authorities said the song is “inappropriate for broadcast” without elaboration. The song satirises President Tinubu’s family and friends who have been lavishing him with hymnal praise as Nigeria sinks deeper into morass.

The raging debate on what transpired before the decision to outlaw the Echoes of War play scripted by former President Ruto’s bosom friend and former Kakamega Senator Cleophas Malala veered off the political storm in public to the domestic relationship in the first family. When Cabinet Secretary for Education Julius Ogamba raised unexplained concerns about the school administration after the play hit the headlines, Mrs Ruto was blamed for the tribulations the young girls.

Initial reports – later denied by the state – said minister was angry at school board of management for allegedly permitting what he described as a scurrilous piece of art to attract such massive national attention.

Attention is now global and filmmakers are homing in. On Friday night, a London-based filmmaker messaged Tell Media to say his company was ready to agree a deal with Malala.

The inconsistencies in government position on creative have at times been hilarious, even ridiculous, the kind of flip-flopping that has now attracted the likes of Hollywood to inquire about playwright’s willingness to turn the play into a film on Kenya’s outrageously corrupt Ruto administration.

During the drama festival in Nakuru, the government deployed a huge contingent of policemen to shoot at and teargas harmless and unarmed school children to prevent them from staging the play.

It required the intervention of the courts to get things going, by which time the students were mentally enervated. They used the time allocated for the play to sing the national anthem and depart the venue.

On Saturday, Tell Media was inundated with calls from international filmmakers in Europe and America who are scrambling for Malala‘s consent to turn Echoes of War into a film that zeroes in Ruto’s excesses. Reached for comment through his friend, the former senator gave the idea a thumbs-up. Now, the play – in form of a film – might be watched by a bigger audience.

Such is the controversy that in Busia County, the controversy was deemed “dangerous” and corruptive to students at regional head teachers’ conference. The conference was dominated with suggestion to deny non-teachers a role in sports and performing arts curriculum. The calls were straightaway rebuffed by creative arts teachers, who argue that students have a right to expression.

The storm round Echoes of War is reminiscent of Chinua Achebe’s Girls at War. The constant in both works of art is the robust revolt against an exploitative political juggernaut.

Achebe’s stories offer a unique perspective on the war, focusing on the experiences of ordinary people caught up in the conflict. The stories are told with wit and insight, and they offer a powerful commentary on the human cost of war. Through his stories, Achebe shows us the ways in which war can tear apart families, communities and even nations, and he reminds us of the importance of empathy and understanding in times of conflict, an anonymous reviewer writes.

In Achebe’s Girls at War, young people are torn between the customs and beliefs of their ancestors and the changing world around them. In Echoes of War, Kenyan youth (Gen Z) question their support for a thieving regime that has improvised their parents and teachers while the Fat Cats in government bulge in body for stealing and eating too much from the ordinary people.

While the conflict in Girls at War is generally pedagogical-cum-patriarchal, in Echoes of War it is gerontological or generational. Both push for a radical change of order to accommodate them and their views. The revolution scares power wielders in either political setting.

The reviewer says that this conflict is particularly evident in the story Dead Men’s Path, where a young schoolteacher clashes with the village elders over the construction of a new path that would disrupt a sacred burial ground. The story highlights the tension between progress and tradition, and the difficulty of reconciling the two. Another recurring theme is the conflict between different cultural groups, particularly between the colonisers and the colonised.

In Girls at War, the protagonist, a young Nigerian woman, finds herself caught up in the violence of the Biafran War, which pits her people against the British-backed Nigerian government.

The uproar over Echoes of War is reverberating in the Kenya Union of Post Primary School Teachers (KUPPET). The union’s chairman Omboko Milemba accuses Malala of ‘contaminating’ the minds young Kenyans with a play steeped themes of betrayal, corruption, assassination and ethnicity.

Milemba, who is MP for Emuhaya and member of the influential parliamentary committee on education proposes radical changes in the curriculum to bar non-teachers from school co-curricular activities like sports and performing arts. KUPPET roots for establishment of guidelines that ensure only teachers take charge of curriculum activities in schools. He was speaking during the Kenya Primary Teachers Heads Association (KEPSHA) Western Regional Conference in Busia.

Drama, music and literature teachers dismissed the controversy over Echoes of War unwarranted and an affront to freedom of expression and freedom to hold opinion. Long-serving Kiswahili teacher Elphassy Shisanya Mwavale says art and creativity should be allowed to thrive and students be given the freedom to enjoy it.

The former Handow Secondary School deputy principal in Lugari, Kakamega, describes as a fallacy the proposal to restrict co-curricular activities to teachers and school.

Shisanya says the current educational setup is poly-disciplinary and “knowledge cannot be pursued in silos.” In addition, understaffing in nearly all schools in Kenya makes difficult to side-line non-teachers.

Citing polydisciplinarity, he says, “There is no doubt that every script has inherent rights. Embracing inherent rights is the conversation at hand – the Butere issue. These are echoes of rights. The right to think and process an idea. The right to scripting thoughts. The right to think is fundamental. No one owns the right or monopolise thinking. The right to tell someone think this way is valid self-expression. That is what all of us are addressing. The scripts are just scripts. Call them lines of thoughts. Human thinking outwardly expressed rights have limitations.”

The experienced arts and language teacher regrets the dearth of skills in areas the political class want ring-fenced to keep off quacks.

He points out, “The desperate narrative that since Cleophas Malalah is a politician and that he should be restrained from writing and directing scripts in schools is hogwash! Before Malalah become a politician he was a thespian. Curtailing him from exercising his right to practise his trade is equivalent to preventing a lawyer who is a politician to practise law and stopping a trained doctor of medicine who is a politician from practising medicine.”

The play has rattled the Ruto administration, which faces allegations of corruption, tribalism, human rights abuses and cronyism in appointment of public service office holders. The public service and state corporations are littered with his Kalenjin kinsmen – some with bare professional qualifications, if any.

Western Kenya has for years dominated art and film industry and for over 100 years school from the region have been known to compete against each other at annual national events. Echoes of War, however, is not the first piece of art to unsettle political chauvinists.

During the Mwai Kibaki reign, Malala kicked up another storm with an equally explosive play, Shackles of Doom that was an indictment of the government of day. The author aimed brickbats at economic exploitation of historically marginalised communities in north-western Kenya who after the discovery of oil in Turkana County were being duped into selling their land for a song. The play was banned and Malala termed heretical.

A synopsis of the lay says Echoes of War is a re-enactment of anti-tax protests in June last year that forced Kenya’s jet-set president to backpedal on punitive proposals in the finance bill that was rushed through parliament, raising suspicion that the legislature had been compromised by the executive.

“We are urging the ministry of education, parliament and all education stakeholders to give proper direction on who should be in charge of school games, drama, music and other co-curricular activities,” Milemba said, noting that “only registered teachers should be in charge of these activities in our schools.”

Milemba told political leaders not promote their political agenda through students.

“We should not include our students in our politics. Students are apolitical as they don’t take part in politics. We should avoid politicising schooling and the curriculum to allow our students to showcase their talents,” he said.

He argued that while the ability to write plays is given to different people, the implementation and direction of those plays should only be limited to registered teachers in various schools. The chairman at the same time said that members of parliament are working on changes to the Teachers Service Commission Act to facilitate proper representation of teachers in the commission.

According to Shisanya, the suggestion is simplistic and counterproductive to the aspiration of the state-touted Competency Based curriculum.

“If there is any provision in the Teachers Service Commission Act to the extent that only trained teachers should handle pupils or students or school-going children while at school then such provision is discriminatory against the best interests of a child, unconstitutional and unrealistic. If that would be the case are cooks, matrons, nurses, storekeepers, bursars, accounts clerks, lab technicians, school guards and secretaries, grounds men and women, librarians et cetera, who handle school children trained teachers? To be a thespian you must have the skill. And our school -going children are entitled to the best thespian skills of the likes of Malaha to perfect their talents,” he argues.

• A Tell Media report