It seems as if I am focusing all my displeased attention on Prof William Ochieng' of Maseno University these days, but his article in today's Daily Nation could not go unanswered (Bring Ruto back so he can save universities). He insists on quoting a letter William Ruto, the suspended Minister for Higher Education, Science and Technology had written to the President regarding the stalled programme of work in the Ministry since his suspension, and using this line of attack to bolster his demand for reinstatement to the Cabinet and restoration to his old job as Minister. The stalled programme includes the failure to push through government the Universities Bill, the Science and Innovation Bill, or the failure to restructure the Joint Admissions Board or the creation of an Open University. Prof Ochieng' opines that these, and other actions he goes on to mention later in his article, if carried out by Mr Ruto will 'save' higher education in Kenya.
My displeasure arises from the fact that Prof Ochieng' fails to take into account the dysfunctional nature of public university administration that no amount of restructuring and tinkering with will correct as he continues to completely ignore the odious effect politicians' political battles have had on higher education in Kenya since prof George Saitoti was nominated to Parliament by President Moi in the early 1980s. But it is in completely ignoring the work that has been done by academicians over the past twenty years, and the policies crafted by civil servants, whom he accuses of cutting out the universities' administrations when crafting those policies, that had they been implemented even halfheartedly would have had profound impacts on the manner in which our young are educated and prepared for a life outside their parents' or teachers' supervision.
The reforms of higher education in Kenya will not be achieved if all hope is pinned on the admittedly unreliable shoulders of a politician; it will only be achieved if all stakeholders take the correct steps to ensure that the proper priorities are set, and that the correct strategies are pursued to address them. The traditional way of managing public resources has proved a failure. The solution is not to throw money at the problem; that will only be a recipe for rent-seeking by the avaricious among us. The solution lies in correctly diagnosing the problems that bedevil our higher education sector and reforming those areas that can be reformed and amputating those that cannot. For example, every Vice-Chancellor imagines that one day he will forge a successful partnership with the private sector to supplement his straitened budget. This is a commendable goal but with the wrong objective in mind. If, as prof Ochieng' claims, universities, especially public universities, are at the cutting edge of research and innovation, then the partnership with the private sector should not be based on the objective of plugging holes in university budgets, but of creating sustainable and reliable avenues of revenue based on an IPR regime that benefits both the universities and the private sector. In the alternative, if money is going to be thrown at the problem of shrinking budgets, it should be towards the restructuring of public university administration, with a view to ensuring that the universities have the capacity to pursue a two-pronged strategy: provision of quality services to an expanding student body and the exploitation of resources available to the university, such as its research, for the creation of sustainable additional revenue streams.
Merely calling for the reinstatement of a politician in order to rescue a situation that requires a concerted effort from all partners papers over the uncomfortable fact that even senior dons, having suffered years of Moi-Era neglect and mistreatment, and wrong-headed Kibaki-Era policies focussed in other priority areas, are now scraping the bottom of the barrel when it comes to viable ideas for the revival of higher education to heights not seen since its glory days of the '60s and '70s. That is how low we have sunk!
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