Political control and tribalism hollowing out public varsities

Lecturer in the Department of Mathematics and Physical Sciences

Dedan Kimathi University of Technology

Every year, thousands of young Kenyans walk through the gates of our universities, driven by the timeless promise of higher education. They are told that these institutions will transform them.

But as faculty members who witness the daily decay of these centres of learning, we are increasingly forced to ask a deeper, more unsettling question of our students and peers alike: You might be going through school, but is the school truly going through you?

Right now, the honest answer is tragic. It is impossible for a university to transform the minds of the next generation when the university itself is structurally broken, financially suffocated and governed by an architecture that belongs to a bygone, feudal era.

As public universities face absolute paralysis amid a nationwide strike, the public is once again treated to the standard narrative: greedy lecturers abandoning lecture halls over salary demands.

Predictable collapse

But this is a lazy diagnosis.

The dropping of the chalk is not the disease; it is the final symptom of institutional organ failure. We are witnessing the predictable collapse of 21st-century centres of excellence being run like medieval chiefdoms.

Look at the numbers that define our reality this week. Public universities are drowning in a jaw-dropping KSh100.3 billion in pending bills, driven by an executive funding deficit in which the State requires KSh70.39 billion for university scholarships but provides only KSh41.2 billion.

This leaves a staggering KSh29 billion funding gap that forces management to withhold statutory deductions, swallow pension schemes and offer tutors fractional percentages of their hard-earned salaries.

Woven basket

Throwing a few billion shillings at this crisis to secure temporary “return-to-work” formulas is like pouring water into a woven basket. The real crisis is structural.

We are trying to sustain modern academic institutions using a governance model designed entirely for top-down political control.

Consider the blatant democratic contradiction at the heart of our republic. The President of Kenya is subjected to a competitive, democratic election by the citizens.

Yet the vice-chancellors, who function as the absolute presidents of their respective universities, are unilateral political appointees. This design flaw distorts everything.

Because vice-chancellors do not owe their seats to the academic community, their vectors of accountability do not point downwards to the professors, researchers and students who give the university life.

Instead, they point strictly upwards to the appointing authority.

Democratically elected

Management becomes an exercise in pleasing political patrons, ticking bureaucratic boxes and managing the “flesh” of administrative paperwork while remaining completely blind to the “soul” of the academy.

If the Head of State must be elected by the people, why should the head of a university not be democratically elected by its own community of scholars?

This top-down political control has been compounded by a newer, equally toxic phenomenon: the extreme parochialism of the university backyard.

Under the guise of devolution and expanding access to education, we have systematically tribalised higher education.

It is now an unwritten, ironclad rule that a vice-chancellor must be a “son or daughter of the soil”, appointed from the dominant ethnic community in the university’s physical location.

Look closely at the administrative organograms of most public institutions today; you will find that a staggering percentage of top management, human resources departments and council members share the same local dialect.

This hyper-localisation has turned universal centres of merit into ethnic fiefdoms. When hiring, promotions and the award of multi-million-shilling tenders are determined by regional and tribal arithmetic rather than blind competence, intellectual rigour dies.

The university ceases to be a global marketplace of ideas and shrinks into a glorified village assembly.

It introduces a subjective, insular management culture that makes running a modern institution entirely untenable.

Profound ailments

We cannot cure these profound ailments with cosmetic public relations or temporary financial bailouts. What the Kenyan academy requires is an urgent, radical structural overhaul.

We must democratise the governance of our universities.

Vice-chancellors should be elected through rigorous, transparent processes by university senates and staff unions, rendering them strictly accountable to the people who actually do the work of education.

Furthermore, we must intentionally de-localise university hiring to restore national and international diversity to our faculty and administration.

True academic freedom and sustainable institutional growth cannot coexist with a feudal administrative model. Until we dismantle this outdated architecture, our universities will remain mere factories of certificates, hollowed out of the very soul that makes them centres of enlightenment.

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Dr Ogutu Keroboto B. Za’Ngoti is a lecturer in the Department of Mathematics and Physical Sciences at Dedan Kimathi University of Technology (DeKUT). okeroboto@gmail.com / ogutu.keroboto@dkut.ac.ke