Did I sense embarrassment in Education minister Sam Ongeri’s mannerism as he tried to explain to Parliament why Cardinal Otunga High School wasn’t among the schools earmarked for elevation to national schools across the country last Thursday?

Turns out that the Kisii-based school, a former giant of the Kenyan secondary school examinations, has been underperforming of late.

My enquiries from a number of people familiar with the history of the school yielded all manner of theories for the decay.

But there seemed to be a consensus that the school might have run into the same management challenges that some institutions formerly in the hands of white men have faced after they changed hands.

In the case of the once mighty Cardinal, I hear the fall has to do with the exodus of the Italian Catholic missionaries who built it. The missionaries were reportedly hounded out by an influential local politician who wanted his cronies in charge.

It reminds me of a reader who sent me a fairly emotional email back in March after I defended Starehe Boys Centre against what I considered lynching by media in this column.

The reader who said he supports the school financially put last year’s not-so impressive performance in the national examination – by its own high standards – down to the death four years ago of the school’s founder Geoffrey Griffin.

“Dr Griffin, a white, had adequate intelligence to know how to run a school… Results prove who is in charge,” he said. To his credit, my reader was kind enough to acknowledge what I think of him.

“A 95% chance exists that you will condemn me as a racist,” he wrote.

Surely, my colour-sensitive reader must be intelligent enough to tell that what is at play here are most likely local politics, turf wars, resource challenges, the wrong individuals on the job, or the normal problems associated with trying to fit in big shoes!

He must have seen the many more complex institutions than schools managed successfully by Africans around him.

Not that all the black Kenyans who have been given the opportunity to run such schools done enough not to expose us to racist remarks. A colleague of mine observes that performance in exams is so lofty a standard against which to measure their management abilities.

“Usually the first thing to go when a indigenous Kenyan takes over the running of a former missionary school are the trees, which are cut down to burn charcoal or for firewood,” he says.