When mother universities cry: How Kenya failed academic giants

The University of Nairobi, once a leading academic hub in East Africa, now grappling with funding challenges and infrastructural decline. [Courtesy]

There was a time when the University of Nairobi did not merely educate; she performed. She walked like Clementina in Song of Lawino! perfumed, polished, intellectually intimidating, and slightly allergic to village dust. She spoke Queen’s English through the nose, wore academic gowns like Parisian fashion, and produced graduates who walked straight from lecture halls into ministries, courtrooms, embassies, and boardrooms as if destiny had personally signed their appointment letters.

And indeed, for decades, she ruled East African rankings the way beauty queens dominate village gossip.

But beauty, unfortunately, is expensive.

The husband, the Kenyan government once adored her. Built her hostels. Painted her walls. Funded her dreams. But slowly, like irresponsible husbands, he discovered younger, cheaper distractions. He abandoned the once-beautiful wife to leaking roofs, unpaid bills, and budget cuts while still demanding she maintain international standards.

Now the old queen applies lipstick over cracks. Still elegant, respected, but tired!

Yet, if UoN was Clementina, the sophisticated wife careful with childbirth and obsessed with status, then MU was Lawino herself; generous, fertile, hardworking, village-bred, deeply maternal, and dangerously productive.

Unlike Nairobi, MU never trusted birth control. While Nairobi quietly swallowed academic “P2s,” “Femi plans,” IUDs, emergency pills, and occasionally denied conjugal rights to regulate & preserve her waistline and rankings, MU opened her gates and multiplied like biblical loaves and fish.

She gave birth generously, recklessly, almost spiritually! as though every new campus was another child wrapped in academic blankets and sent into the world with only a blessing, a borrowed library, and optimism.

At one point, it became difficult to tell whether MU was running a higher learning institution or a maternity ward for universities. Villagers began suspecting that every time the government coughed, another constituent college appeared!

And now even the little Kabarnet has appeared mysteriously. In fact, villagers still whisper about! “No one saw her pregnant.” “The ears do not resemble the father.” “Maybe let the child grow first! We shall know the father by the walking style, appetite, stubbornness, or how it holds a pen.”

Such is the fertility of a prolific village woman. But let us not reduce this to comedy alone.

Behind the laughter sits tragedy, wearing torn clothes. MU was not born accidentally in a political rally. She emerged from rigorous national thought. In 1981, Arap Moi commissioned the Mackay... to study Kenya’s educational future and the need for a second university. The result was vision, not improvisation. Research, not slogans.

And so, in 1984, MU was born to decentralise opportunity and democratize knowledge.

Today, that same institution groans under billions in debt like an old mother abandoned by the very children she breastfed.

Its hostels age like forgotten widows. Its lecture halls dilapidated! Its workers survive on promises and circulars. Salaries unpredictable like rain in January. Meanwhile, politicians circle her endowed fundamentals like hyenas inspecting an injured buffalo. Every acre is eyed greedily. Every building is seen as an opportunity. The vulnerable mother, abandoned in a leaking house, is now exposed to economic defilement by land grabbers disguised as rescuers.

And perhaps nowhere is this tragedy more surreal than in the strange claims occasionally emerging from dusty files and court corridors; tales of firms demanding billions for buildings allegedly constructed in 1991, claims resurrected after over three decades as though time itself had been bribed into silence. One begins to suspect that some people no longer see universities as centres of knowledge but as wounded elephants whose ivory must be harvested before death.

And where are the children she raised?

Some are now independent universities wearing suits and sunglasses, pretending not to recognise their mother in public.

One almost wishes Parliament had passed a law forcing successful children to support their parents! even a gorogoro of flour toward their mother’s survival.

Because without these two giants, modern Kenya itself becomes intellectually orphaned.

Look carefully across Kenya’s leadership. The judiciary, academia, media, diplomacy, medicine, engineering, banking, and politics bear the fingerprints of these institutions. Court judgments, parliamentary debates, newsroom headlines, hospital corridors, and diplomatic negotiations all carry echoes from lecture halls in Nairobi and Kesses.

Even Parliament today resembles sibling rivalry from one dysfunctional academic family. Senators exchange ideological blows with the confidence of classmates who once shared lecture notes and tea kiosks instead of rescuing the collapsing homestead that educated them.

And the irony deepens.

Kenya today overflows with mushrooming universities claiming miraculous rankings through suspicious statistical gymnastics. Some appear overnight, like kiosks after elections. Yet comparing them to MU or UoN is like comparing a TikTok motivational speaker to Shakespeare after two bottles of busaa.

History matters. Depth matters. A university is not merely buildings and Wi-Fi. It is memory. Tradition. Intellectual culture. Scholarly scars accumulated over decades. Education without history is counterfeit wisdom.

The death of these institutions should disturb every right-thinking Kenyan. For if UoN loses part of its intellectual soul. If MU dies, the Rift Valley loses a living monument of post-independence educational imagination.

Somewhere in these collapsing corridors, professors who once terrified students with Latin phrases and red pens now queue nervously at ATMs like ordinary mortals praying for miracles. Great scholars who debated jurisprudence, quantum theory, and Shakespeare now whisper to landlords and school fees clerks. The staffrooms, once alive with intellectual arrogance and revolutionary manifestos, now resemble economic recovery camps where lecturers discuss side hustles involving poultry, avocado farming, motivational speaking, and occasionally selling academic gowns to survive the semester.

Otherwise, we shall continue producing campuses without scholarship, titles without intellect, and graduates without faith in education itself. And then one day, Kenya will wake up to discover that while it was busy multiplying universities, it accidentally buried the very idea of a university altogether.