Have we lost our universities?

The day I knew we had lost our universities and institutions of high learning was the day I heard a news reader declaim without batting an eyelid (he'd miss something on the teleprompter, see?) the fateful statement, "It will give you psyche." I am not a cultural snob and I know what the statement intends, but I also know that that statement is fit only for the sheng'ed-out environs of the Russia Terraces at the City Stadium. 

This revelation has now been solidified by the supposed letter from the Chairman of the Students' Organisation of Nairobi University to the Ambassador of the United States to Kenya. It says a lot that many are willing to believe that the letter is indeed its author's intended message. If it is confirmed that the letter was indeed authored by Mr Owino, I fear we will have a fair struggle to rescue our universities and institutions of high learning.

All is not lost, though. The Jomo Kenyatta University of Agricultural Technology, JKUAT, since its glory days in the bosom of the Japan International Co-operation Agency, recently announced that it had assembled Kenya's first laptop computer. Small beer, many unfairly remarked, but had they read what Prof Calestous Juma had written in the New African, they would appreciate that JKUAT is pushing its graduates in the right direction: scientific curiosity and exploration, developing new knowledge and skills, and expanding the minds of the scientific and entrepreneurial "leaders of tomorrow."

The Comrade Chairman's letter, full of bombast and base threats, alludes to biological functions unfitting to be addressed to the leader of the free world. I have attempted to justify why a jumped up junior city rabble-rouser would purport to address the most powerful leader in the world and my mind draws a complete blank. The two are not peers. They do not have a diplomatic relationship either. What would posses the Comrade Chairman to beg for an audience between the President of the United States and the Comrade Chairman's eighty four thousand "furiously intelligent" comrades by making threats that evoke pity and sadness rather than fear?

This is the same person who is alleged to have asked the President of Kenya for petrol fuel to set fire to something or the other that had annoyed the President at that time. Is this the leadership that the University of Nairobi is grooming these days, fit only for the ethnicised low politics of the day? Is this why Prof Juma chooses to keep the academic flames burning in bitterly-cold-in-winter Massachusetts, why Ngugi wa Thiong'o only makes occasional forays to Kenya and why when you hear the appellation "PhD" or "MD" after a Kenyan Cabinet Secretary's name, a small voice at the back of you mind whispers, "How much did his doctorate cost him?" because it is almost certain that his research credentials died with the conferment of the round hat and his publications' record has been stifled by the avid brown-nosing of the powers-that-be.

Mr Owino is a symbol of a malaise that we have ignored for far too long. It is reflected in the mule-headed stubbornness about reforming high education in Kenya. It is reflected in high education policies that revolve around mass enrollment, not quality education. It is reflected in this particularly juicy line by the Comrade Chairman, "Also, 31 female students have threatened to urinate on the tree that President Obama planted in 2006 should he not visit the UON. Male students may do worse." Some universities are arming their students with technical skills which they can build on to conquer the world. Other universities are encouraging the basest behaviour displayed by political and other leaders. One or the other will be our legacy.

Also, 31 female students have threatened to urinate on the tree president Obama planted in 2006 should he not visit the UON . Male students may do worse. - See more at: http://news-kenya.com/2015/07/babu-owino-university-nairobi-obama-visit-kenya/#sthash.LmOuQmQ4.dpuf