When you clip wings of scholars, do not expect the children to fly

University lecturers face pay disputes as concerns grow over the value placed on education. [Courtesy]

There is a village where the chief fears the schoolteacher, the wealthy man fears the village elder, and the politician fears anybody who can explain why the village remains poor despite receiving development funds every election year.

In this village, a man who cannot read a budget may become its custodian, while the professor who can explain every comma in it must first explain why he deserves enough money to buy cooking oil.

Welcome to Kenya, where the educated are encouraged to acquire knowledge, provided they do not acquire too much money alongside it.

There appears to be an unwritten village law, drafted by invisible elders and approved over expensive tea, that a professor must be brilliant in the head but humble in the pocket. He may understand constitutionalism, artificial intelligence, economics and the political economy of corruption, but he must not become too comfortable. A comfortable professor might begin asking uncomfortable questions.

And we cannot have that.

Imagine a professor with a respectable salary, a reliable vehicle and enough money to buy a cup of tea for people who gather to hear him speak. He drives into the village trading centre, parks beneath a tree and begins explaining why the price of unga has risen, why public debt has grown legs, and why development projects sometimes arrive in campaign season but disappear when the ballot boxes are packed away.

People gather.

The boda boda rider switches off his motorcycle. The farmer wipes his hands on his trouser legs. The young graduate moves closer. Even the village drunk, who normally believes every politician is his cousin, pauses to listen.

Then the professor says something dangerous.

He asks the people to think.

That is when the politician’s stomach begins making noises! Not from hunger, but from intellectual insecurity.

A politician can defeat an opponent with a slogan, drown him in a convoy or bury him beneath campaign posters. But how does one defeat a professor who can calmly explain the difference between a promise and a policy, between a budget and a bag of tricks, between development and a photograph taken beside a grader?

The village has a proverb: when a man fears the light, do not be surprised when he begins quarrelling with the lamp.

Perhaps this explains our national romance with poorly paid scholars.

Let us therefore offer a modest proposal: professors must be paid peanuts, not because their work is worth peanuts, but because their poverty may be the cheapest political security system ever invented.

A hungry professor has no money for fuel. His jalopy coughs at the gate like a goat that has swallowed a campaign manifesto. The engine starts only after three prayers, two kicks of the accelerator and a promise to visit the mechanic after payday.

He drives to campus, but not before checking whether the vehicle can survive the journey without requiring a loan application.

When he arrives, he parks behind a building. Not because he is ashamed of honest work, but because Gen Z has cameras, editing skills and a wicked sense of humour. One photograph of his smoke-belching vehicle, accompanied by the caption Professor of Advanced Engineering, Department of Mechanical Suffering, could circulate faster than his latest journal article.

The professor has published research on innovation, but his car is still innovating new noises.

Yet the jalopy is not the real scandal. A scholar can travel by bicycle and remain intellectually wealthy. The scandal is a society that demands world-class thinking while making the thinker calculate whether he can afford lunch.

In the village, when a cow gives less milk, a sensible farmer examines the feed. Our leaders, however, appear tempted to inspect the cow’s attitude.

Teachers and lecturers strike. They march through the streets. They carry placards, sing solidarity songs and explain that signed agreements should mean something. The government listens with the patience of a man waiting for rain while sitting beneath a leaking roof.

Then comes the familiar choreography: a meeting, a promise, a disagreement about what was promised, and eventually the discovery that the matter requires further consultation.

Enter the committee.

Its members gather to listen to demands already written in black and white. The setting is suitably dignified: a comfortable hotel, steaming tea, a well-laid table and sitting allowances that seem more dependable than the salaries under discussion.

They listen. They nod. They consult. They adjourn.

The students remain at home.

One wonders whether the next consultation will examine why a document signed by adults requires so many adults to explain it.

In the village, there is a difference between a meeting called to solve a problem and a meeting called because solving the problem would end the meeting.

Our committee culture occasionally makes one suspect that the second type has discovered a permanent address.

Meanwhile, a student who should be learning medicine, law, communication or engineering sits idle. A parent who has borrowed money for fees wonders whether the semester will ever end. A lecturer who should be supervising research is preparing another placard. The nation’s future is placed on hold while officialdom polishes its minutes.

The village chicken may be laying eggs, but the people entrusted with the nest are still discussing its management.

History reminds us that university scholarship once occupied a formidable place in Kenya’s public imagination. Professors were not merely employees waiting for payday; they were sources of research, intellectual challenge and national reflection. Historical salary figures show a full professor earning Sh2,250 in 1963 and Sh3,050 in 1973, while permanent secretaries earned Sh3,625 and Sh6,600 respectively. These figures do not prove that professors earned more than MPs. They do remind us that the place of scholarship in national life cannot be measured by a single payslip.

The professor’s authority came from the power to think, question and offer society a different road when everyone else was following the herd into a ditch.

And that is precisely why a professor should not be mistaken for a political competitor. A lecturer who explains the Constitution is not preparing to overthrow the government. A researcher who exposes a policy’s weaknesses is not declaring war on a minister. A scholar who offers advice is not necessarily seeking a share of the national cake; he may simply be explaining why the cake keeps shrinking while the number of people holding plates increases.

Education is a public resource. The professor’s ideas are not a rival government. They are tools that government can use to make better decisions.

But imagine the pleasure of a political leader watching a professor demonstrate outside Parliament, holding a placard and demanding a fair wage. There stands a person who has spent years studying society, reduced to pleading with the society’s elected representatives to honour agreements.

One can almost hear the imaginary chorus from the comfortable seats: “Three per cent? Aha! The House has it!”

The applause in this scene is satire, not a claim about a specific parliamentary event. Yet the contrast is painful. Political remuneration can appear to enjoy a different urgency from the pay of those who teach the next generation of doctors, engineers, lawyers and public servants.

If the government’s reported offer is three per cent, while annual inflation is 6.5 per cent as reported by the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics in July 2026, the arithmetic deserves attention. A pay increase below inflation may leave workers with less purchasing power, even before rent, food, transport and school fees arrive to collect their share.

A village elder would put it simply: if you add two cups of water to a pot that is losing three cups, do not invite the neighbours to celebrate the harvest.

The deeper tragedy is the lesson being taught to every young Kenyan watching from the classroom door. Study hard, we tell them. Pursue knowledge. Become a researcher. Earn a doctorate. Serve society.

Then they watch a professor beg for what was already negotiated and begin to wonder whether education is a ladder or merely an expensive staircase leading to a locked door.

When appointments appear to reward political loyalty more than professional expertise, the message grows worse. We should not assume that every political appointee lacks merit, but a system that treats specialist knowledge as optional weakens the institutions it claims to lead.

A village that appoints a man to guard its granary because he praised the chief may soon discover that loyalty cannot identify a rat.

Dear leaders, please do not fear professors. They are not your competitors. Their proper work is to question, research, teach and offer ideas—not to contest every political seat or demand ownership of the national microphone.

Pay them fairly. Honour agreements. Resolve disputes in education and health before students and patients become collateral damage in administrative theatre.

Do not confuse a professor’s modest car with a modest mind. Do not mistake a lecturer’s demonstration for an invitation to humiliation. And do not imagine that keeping scholars poor makes politicians look powerful.

A village elder once observed that a man who cuts down every tall tree because it makes his hut look small will eventually live in a treeless village. He may enjoy the view for a season, but when the sun comes, he will discover why the trees were there.

When a country clips the wings of its professors, it should not expect its children to fly.

For the truth, unlike officialdom, does not need sitting allowances to reach the village. It walks barefoot. It enters the market, sits beneath the tree and waits patiently for the people to notice that the emperor’s convoy is impressive—but the road ahead is still full of potholes.

And when the last professor has stopped speaking, the last teacher has surrendered and the last student has stopped asking questions, our leaders may finally enjoy the silence they worked so hard to create.

Only then will they discover the terrible price of peace without thought.

The village will be quiet. The classrooms will be empty. And the peanuts will remain plentiful enough for everyone except the monkeys who were supposed to guard the harvest.