President William Ruto inherited a university funding system in trouble. He cannot, therefore, be blamed for creating every problem in Kenya’s public universities.
But he can be held responsible for what he promised to do about them and this is where the record of his administration becomes difficult to defend.
He is burying his head in the sand as he continues to argue that the student-centred financing model has helped universities.
The facts tell a different story. The funding is falling short of the requirement and even the debts in universities continue to grow.
Ruto came to power promising to reform a broken higher education financing system.
His administration scrapped the old funding arrangement and introduced the Student-Centred Funding Model in 2023, selling it as a fairer and more sustainable way of financing university education.
It was supposed to be the solution, but four years later, the universities are still broke.
Worse, the government is not even providing enough money to finance the model it introduced.
This year alone, the government requires Sh47.36 billion to finance university scholarships under the model.
Parliament has provided Sh30.92 billion. That leaves a Sh16.44-billion-hole, money that universities will not receive.
And it comes as more than 200,000 government-sponsored students prepare to enter public universities.
The history matters because it exposes the contradiction.
For years, Kenya’s public universities were financed through a government-heavy system. As enrolment grew, the state introduced cost-sharing and later differentiated funding.
Under President Uhuru Kenyatta, the number of university students increased rapidly. Initially, only a fraction of the students were funded. Male students were funded at a cut-off mark of B+(plus) and female students at B(plain).
But in 2016, the Uhuru Kenyatta administration pledged to finance all students who made the university cut-off mark and cracks emerged as financing failed to match the growing student numbers.
By 2022/23, the funding deficit under the old differentiated unit cost system had grown to more than Sh53 billion.
That was the mess Ruto inherited and upon taking over government, he promised that students would receive funding according to need and that universities would receive more predictable financing.
It was Ruto’s answer to a problem that had crippled universities for years, and in the first year, the model was fully funded before cracks emerged.
But in the second year, the model met a familiar stumbling block as the money did not match the need.
In three years, the cumulative shortfall has reached approximately Sh38.7 billion.
This is the uncomfortable truth about the Ruto funding model: the government created a financing system whose bill it has repeatedly failed to pay.
The President’s administration cannot keep blaming the old system when it has already spent four years running a new one.
Nor can it blame universities for becoming indebted when the institutions are being asked to educate students with less money than the government itself says they require.
Yet the government’s response has largely been to redesign the system again.
Now Parliament is considering another funding and placement law.
This is becoming Kenya’s favourite solution to policy failure: change the name, change the formula and declare a new beginning.
