The sorry state of hostels in Kenyan universities

Horrifying memories still haunt Jay Makorani years after he narrowly survived the grip of the infamous axe-wielding “Pita Mashoka” gang that roamed Moi University’s main campus, Eldoret, for close to a decade. Makorani escaped with a dislocated jaw and broken bones. Most of Mashoka’s victims were students who had rented houses outside the university and would return to their houses after nightfall.
Makorani, a geography graduate who lived at Blue Gate, a private hostel secured by the university to accommodate students who fail to get rooms in the university’s hostel, still finds it hard to believe that he survived the ordeal.

“I was walking along a muddy poorly-lit university street from McKay Building, a student’s resource centre, to my room when the attacker ambushed me. It was around 8.30pm,” Makorani recalls.
He says that a man caught up with him in the darkness and attacked him with a blunt object, hitting him several times on the head. He passed out and woke up the following morning in the university’s dispensary. He was later taken to the Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital for specialised treatment. Another student was attacked in a similar fashion the same night.
A few years after Makorani’s brutal encounter, attacks suspected to have been carried out by Mashoka continued to be reported, sometimes ending up in deaths. Students stumbled upon the body of a comrade who had been raped. The third year female student met her death at night on her way to her rented house in one of the university’s surrounding villages.
Her colleagues staged a protest, demanding that security be beefed up, especially for students who didn’t live within the university. Several years after the ordeal, Makorani urges the university management to take advantage of its vast resources to provide for student accommodation within the university premises where they can be protected. “Moi University main campus has enough land to build hostels that can accommodate all its students. Providing security to students living within the university is easier than extending security measures to private hostels,” he says.