When a Signed CBA Becomes a Suggestion: Kenya's Strange War on University Education

UASU has accused the government of failing to honoiur the CBA agreement. [File, Standard]

There is something deeply peculiar about the way Kenya treats its lecturers. The Government can sign a Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA), shake hands, smile for photographs and allow everyone to return to work believing that an agreement means what the English language says it means: an agreement. Then, sometime later, the same Government behaves as though the document was merely an ambitious suggestion.

Why would an employer allow an entire cadre of workers to honour its side of a negotiated return-to-work formula while appearing reluctant to honour the bargain? This is no longer merely a labour dispute. It is a troubling question about agreements, constitutionalism and the dignity of public service.

The 2010 Constitution did not treat education as decorative wallpaper. It placed education among the foundations of national development and human dignity. Universities are therefore not factories producing graduates according to market demand. They are institutions for producing knowledge, questioning power, preserving scholarship and training citizens capable of interrogating the very Government that employs them.

Yet the new funding model increasingly makes universities resemble roadside businesses: the more customers you attract, the more money you deserve. Lecturers are gradually becoming academic sales representatives. Instead of asking, “What knowledge should this country produce?” they may soon be asking, “Professor, how many students have you recruited today?”

Imagine applying the same arithmetic elsewhere. Should a judge be paid according to the number of cases before the court? Should a surgeon's salary depend on the number of patients admitted? Should a police officer's remuneration depend on the number of criminals caught?

Education has never been built on such crude mathematics.

From Plato's Academy to modern universities, scholarship has been understood as a public good whose value cannot always be counted by immediate numerical output. The Humboldtian tradition places teaching and research at the centre of intellectual development. Knowledge is not merely a commodity sold to the highest number of customers; it is a long-term investment in society's intellectual infrastructure.

And Kenya seems determined to conduct an experiment on this principle every electoral season.

The President recently reminded the nation that university financing has travelled through several versions, from approaches associated with the Moi era, through Kibaki and subsequent administrations, to the present arrangement. One almost expects NFM 2.0, followed by NFM 3.0, and eventually the National Funding Model Experimental Edition.

Our education reforms have followed a similar pilgrimage: 8-4-4 gave way to CBC, which evolved into CBE, while Kenyans watch nervously, wondering whether the next acronym will be CBD Competency-Based Disappointment, or CDF Competency-Driven Frustration.

The problem is not reform itself. Education must evolve. The problem is changing its architecture without sufficiently demonstrating sustained empirical evidence, rigorous evaluation and long-term planning.

More disturbing is the perception that political loyalty increasingly outranks professional competence. When educated citizens become inconvenient because they ask questions, examine budgets, challenge policies and demand accountability, weakening institutions that produce independent thinkers becomes dangerously tempting.

An insecure graduate is easier to manipulate. A poorly funded university is easier to control.

That is why refusing to honour a properly negotiated CBA is bigger than withholding money from lecturers. It risks becoming an assault on the culture of constitutional governance itself.

The Government should not repeatedly force professors into strikes merely to remind it that agreements are binding. A professor belongs in a laboratory, lecture theatre, library or research field not on a pavement holding a placard asking an employer to honour its own signature.

When lecturers are forced to beg for what was negotiated and signed, the humiliation does not belong to the professor.

It belongs to the republic.

And perhaps the most embarrassing lesson is this: a government that cannot keep faith with those who teach the nation how to think should not be surprised when those people begin asking what, exactly, the nation is being taught to become.