Professionals say Commission for Higher Education can’t regulate courses

By JAMES MWANGI

Professional regulatory bodies have opposed attempts by the Commission for Higher Education to control certificate and diploma courses offered by Kenya’s universities.

Emboldened by the Universities Act, which seeks revolutionalised higher education in the country, the organisations are now working on modalities of regulating courses offered at the institutions of higher learning.

The regulatory bodies told Education CUE has no business regulating the courses in universities, saying responsibility should be left to them.

“Professional regulatory bodies are supposed to accredit courses. They are best placed to set standards and requirements of the course,” explained Registrar of Clinical Officers Council, Micah Kisoo explained.

He added, “We are the ones who know the technical areas in the profession. A nurse should follow standards set by a nurse and not by an outsider who may not understand what the profession entails.”

He said his organisation inspects the curriculum, infrastructure and institution’s capacity before allowing a university to offer a professional course in the field.

The moribund Commission for Higher Education was until its disbandment discharging these regulatory services and had triggered discontent.

Some players in the higher education say during that period, the commission did not have the capacity to carry out its supervisory mandate and used to outsource the services to consultants.

Vested interests

“We were unhappy with this arrangement as some secretariat staff at times appointed their cronies who had vested interests and at times refused to approve a programme submitted by private university if it was deemed to offer a rival competitive edge,” explained a CUE insider, who could not be named ass he was not authorised to speak to the Press.

According to the officer, the technocrats in the commission at the time picked their friends and cronies to evaluate the courses for commission to consider approval.

“Before it was replaced with CUE, the CHE had conceded it was ill equipped to deal with accreditation of private universities,” he claimed.

During a meeting held on October 28, 2011, the commission, vide Min/CHE/543, observed that it had serious capacity challenges and it was taking an average of 7.6 weeks to approve a programme.

“Only eight academic programmes have been approved in the last quarter, taking an average of 7.6 weeks,” the commission had conceded.

Earlier in 2008, the commission had on January 28 been astonished to learn its curriculum committee had only approved one degree programme in the 2007/2008 financial year while seven were discussed and evaluation report of five prepared.

Now players in the higher education fear, with the new law requiring all public institutions to be regulated by CUE, the commission will not be able to cope with all the 67 universities and their constituent colleges.

“If it takes at about seven weeks to approve a single programme, and assuming each of the 67 institutions apply for a programme, it will take 469 weeks or nine years for CUE to complete the process,” explained the officer.

What is more, the Efficiency Monitoring Unit recently audited the commission and found it had no capacity to discharge some of its core duties. EMU, which was guided by some of the minutes exposing CUE’s capacity deficiency, recommended the commission fully operationalises the Universities Act and stick to its core activities.

Who attended forum?

CUE has been working behind the scenes to win over the professional regulatory bodies to control the lucrative programmes.

On May 17, the commission held a stakeholders forum where GC Njine proposed CUE’s processes be harmonised with those of professional bodies. The forum was attended by representatives of 14 universities as well as Architectural Association of Kenya, Council of Legal Education, Kenya Veterinary Board and Kenya Medical Laboratory and Technicians Board.

It was further resolved that regulatory professional bodies were legally entitled to determine the curriculum of the programmes offered by universities.