Honour CBA with lecturers for genuine varsity education

University lecturers take to Nairobi’s streets to protest the stalled 2025–2029 Collective Bargaining Agreement. [Jonah Onyango, Standard]

Does Kenya value the production of knowledge? This is the big question as the public universities’ lecturers’ strike approaches one month.

The government has not honoured the 2025–2029 collective bargaining agreement (CBA) with the dons. After talking to a deaf government for months on end, the dons took the only option left, the strike.

The Ministry of Education hems and haws over the matter. Top National Treasury officials appear unconcerned. Their Ministry of Education counterparts make meaningless pronouncements. The Cabinet Secretary and his Principal Secretary can only “urge the lecturers to return to the classroom.” What is that?

Lecturers have been “urged to embrace sobriety.” CS Julius Ogamba has repeatedly said “the government is committed to solving the CBA dispute through peaceful talks rather than disruptions that harm students’ education.”

 That it is hard pressed to fulfil its CBA with the dons. It is rather that this is a low priority matter for a government spending billions of shillings on early election campaigns and on other wasteful ventures.

Every day, Kenyan homes are assailed by TV images of top government officials in diverse parts of the country, drowning citizens in campaign rhetoric. The gatherings come in the guise of “launching and inspecting projects.” They mostly feature President Ruto, with top-heavy trains of State who is who.

The great unwashed masses are featured clad in seas of yellow UDA party colours that cost hundreds of millions of shillings. As that is happening, the deputy president will be in another region, doing the same. The two speakers of Parliament will be somewhere else, and the prime cabinet secretary in some other place.

There are many other State functionaries, splashing public funds on partisan politics, whose only measurable value is in angry words meted out against the opposition. A government that behaves in this manner cannot plead absence of funds. It is rather a question of priorities. The Kenya Kwanza government can spend public funds on premature 2027 election campaigns, but it cannot find funds to honour an existing CBA.

The message to the academic community is that its intellectual labour is dispensable. The social contract means nothing. Nor does higher education as a public good mean anything. Now, consider the paradox that during some of these jamborees, President Ruto will announce that he is going to build a new university somewhere. It may be in Ol Kalou, or in Emurua Dikir, or some other place.

A government that cannot honour existing funding agreements with public universities can find money to start building new universities. How now? Where else do such things happen? You are struggling to sustain existing universities. But you are also putting up structures and calling them new universities. President Ruto often talks of people he says are empty in the head. But what could possibly be emptier? Public universities are technically insolvent. But someone is saying he is building new universities, “to expand university education.”

Do the people in Jogoo House understand the meaning of a university? A university is not defined by bricks and mortar. It is a community of scholars, who excel in generation of knowledge. It is about the faculty as a community of academics, gathered around an intellectual mission. It is also about the programmes and new ground being broken.

That starts defining a university. In essence, Kenya Kwanza’s dramatic optics about expanding university education hardly go beyond political gimmicks, intended to inveigle what they see as voting humanoids. Without a dense network of professors, researchers, and students – all united in pushing the frontiers of knowledge – it is not a university. 

Without human interaction between faculty and learners, the so-called campus is an empty shell. Without academic research and freedom, that thing is not a university. Indeed, it is now possible to have a university without physical buildings. The faculty is the starting point. A country that fools around with the faculty does not know why it has education in the first place.

A society that messes up its higher learning muddles up its technical competitive capacity in the arena of nations. The people in the National Treasury and those in Jogoo House need to review funding priorities for university education. They need to advise State House truthfully. Kenya cannot afford to gamble with university education. This mess has gone on for too long. The government should stop splashing funds on wasteful campaigns and instead honour the 2025–2029 CBA with public universities, as well as other CBAs.

-Dr Muluka is a strategic communications adviser.