Pissing in the wind.

I'll admit it. I was a bit smug that my law degree is not tainted by doubt, even though it was obtained in a little-known bit of the world's largest democracy. Employers, and some demanding clients, may not like that it was obtained over there, but they are confident that it was not obtained using less than academic means. I am a bit smug that though my alma mater does not have the same kind of sheen, it is not viewed with something bordering contempt as the University of Nairobi and its fellow public universities are viewed. More importantly, my alma mater seems not to be part of the conversation about the risks to the economy that the doubtful degrees and diplomas being offered by our high education system engender.

Now that I am through gloating, what are we to do about the state of high education in Kenya? A lot, it turns out, though the most difficult step will prove to be the most difficult to take. Many will extol the virtues of better policing of the high education system by the Ministry, its agencies and the Commission of University Education, the CUE, but these will forever remain mere salves for the sores festering in the cold, bracing winds of global academic competition. Some will extol further the virtues of better terms and conditions for those in charge of the education and training of our future manpower, but this too will remain a band-aid used to stanch a gushing amputation.

The most important reform would have to be the removal of the dead hand of the Cabinet Secretary from the levers of power in the public high education system, and the proper empowerment of the CUE to perform its proper role without interference. The Cabinet Secretary has revealed the foundations for the formation of the first post-2013 Cabinet to be a great fraud on the public: he is a politician first and a technocrat next, and in his latter role he has proven woefully inept. It seems that the Cabinet Secretary and his mandarins have allowed their worries over laptops-for-tots and similar totemic big-ticket tender projects to distract them from their proper roles: policy and fiscal discipline for the public education sector, including the high education sector.

The Ministry's and CUE's over-involvement in the administration of public universities almost always guarantees that Vice-Chancellors and their administrative teams work with an eye out for politicians and political operatives with axes to grind. To keep the barbarians at the gate off their turf, university administrations have become adept at currying political favour with ministerially-favourable big-ticket projects such as has been witnessed by the recent real estate expansion of almost all public universities that have little utility in quality education improvement, but are beautiful for placating rent-seeking politicians and political operatives.

So long as Cabinet Secretaries and their minders live in the antediluvian world in which the politicians "owned" the public enterprises for which they made policy, high education in Kenya will continue to be subject to these kinds of doubt. The public education sector, which has the potential to answer the Big Questions that the private sector would not touch unless they were heavily and publicly subsidised to do so, will eventually be supplanted by the private sector if it continues to be run as a political piggy bank by the national Executive. For example, there was a time when, after the collapse of the East African Community, the University of Nairobi was the premier law university after the University of Dar es Salaam. Today we doubt very seriously the calibre of law graduates from Kenya's allegedly leading university and thinking seriously of considering the new graduates from the Strathmore University School of Law or, horror of horrors, Indian universities!

How the Government of Kenya will manage to wean itself from politicking with everything remains the mystery of the ages, but a break with that culture is necessary to improve public high education and, in turn, the entire high education sector. The first step is the hardest to take, yet without it we are all pissing in the wind.