By Henry Munene
NAIROBI, KENYA: Kenyan universities have in recent years recorded tremendous growth. Their expansion has been so astronomical that, thanks largely to the privately-sponsored students programmes, the public universities have become so ‘loaded’ they have been beating blue-chip companies in the race to snap up prime plots and swanky buildings in downtown Nairobi and other cities.
Quite commendably, they now boast new satellite campuses in the remotest hamlets in the country. Private campuses have also grown apace, taking us closer to the promised land, where students who attain the university entry qualification will no longer have to cut short their pursuit of education just because they cannot be absorbed.
Again, it was rather embarrassing that many found it easier and cheaper to go to neighbouring countries that – one would have thought – could never ever hold the candle for us in academics. Commendable as this growth may be, there are pitfalls – the usual suspects – to look out for.
The first one is ethnic inbreeding. In this era of devolution, many professionals are leaving world capitals for their native counties in Kenya, ostensibly to spur development. And while it is all very well for a son or daughter of the land to return and seek a teaching job at the new ‘county’ university, we must guard against the possibility of this new exodus further fuelling the puerile essentialist thinking that has led to a situation where most campuses, according to a red-flag report by the National Cohesion and Integration Commission, are fast becoming cauldrons of ethnicity.
It goes without saying that higher education quality stands to be compromised every time a campus prefers a ‘native’ pseudo-lecturer to a thoroughbred scholar just because the latter was born and had his umbilical cord buried a few ethnic ridges away.
Surely, no one wants to be Kainyu from Magumoni, educated at Magumoni Primary, went to Magumoni Girls and then to Magumoni University where she was taught by lecturers from Magumoni village.
To produce truly ‘universal’ intellectual citizens of the globe, the new institutions must go beyond the ‘face of Kenya’ and even encourage exchange programmes with offshore campuses. Another temptation campuses must resist is laying emphasis on physical facilities at the expense of lecturers and teaching resources. Now, the core business of a university is to teach and do research. And it is sad that there are still murmurs that the reason our lecturers keep shuttling between town campuses is more a desire to make ends meet than to share knowledge with humanity.
Many of them give up the fight for better salaries at some point and ‘fly out’, often to excel as top-rate researchers with patented inventions jutting out of their briefcases.
What one wonders is: why not pay them a decent salary when they are here and demand results? Is it not hypocritical to harp on the importance of universities and still let our professors haplessly go reproducing ‘yellowing’ class notes because they are forever worried about the next meal? Talking of students, increasing the Higher Education Loans Board (Helb) maximum by Sh20,000 was a good gesture. Helb should even explore the option of a higher learning bond and give students enough cash and thus shield them from hunger and temptations to photocopy copyrighted books.
A decent living will also keep our young men off ‘keg’ joints and barricade the girls from the portly city sugar daddies who bait them with ‘pocket money’ and ‘shopping’.
In short, we have the brains and the wherewithal to convert our universities into world-class centres of excellence. We just need the official goodwill to cut to the chase.
