Ignore this ‘expert’ advice on higher education

ONE KNOWS ONE IS GROWing old when one begins sentences with, “In my day…”. This is exactly what I found myself doing with some Swedish friends, as I recounted to them the days when education, from primary to university level in Kenya was free and accessible to all regardless of income, race or social status.

One of the Swedes couldn’t hold back the look of shock on his face when I told him that “in my day, students were not only given text books, but also exercise books and pencils for free.

What’s more, if you were bright enough to get a place at university, the government paid you an allowance for being there, and provided free accommodation to boot.”

For a Swede, the idea that education should be free for all is not particularly revolutionary. Like in many European countries, citizens of this country enjoy free education from nursery to PhD level. They consider free education to be a birthright, and many are horrified at the prospect of students being denied the right to learn because they cannot afford to pay the fees.

The Swedes, therefore, believe that they are among the most “civilised” and humane of industrialised countries. Many of them, for instance, look down on American universities for charging exorbitant fees because they genuinely believe that education is not a commodity that should be purchased.

To be told that once upon a time the Kenyan Government had similar beliefs and was therefore as “civilised” as Sweden, surprises them.

“So when and why did things change?’’ asked Oscar, my former supervisor at a Swedish university where I had obtained a Masters degree without paying a cent.

“In the 1980s, when the World Bank and the IMF imposed structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) on Kenya,” I replied. “We were told that Kenya could not afford to provide free education and should begin charging fees.”

Any development expert will agree that SAPs had devastating consequences. Poverty and inequality worsened in almost every country where the programmes were implemented.

So why is an expert group recommending another version of SAPs to the Ministry of Higher Education by urging public universities not only to increase the fees charged to students, but also to sell key assets such as land and increase the interest on student loans?

Could it be because the expert group is being guided by donors? Very likely, considering that one of the recommendations in the report is that universities be allowed to borrow from lending institutions such as the World Bank and the African Development Bank to enable them to expand and improve their facilities.

IN OTHER WORDS, AFTER INCREASING the fees (which ostensibly would be used to expand and improve facilities) the universities should now go into debt with none other than the World Bank or its affiliates. If the objective of the expert group was to make the universities self-sustaining, then this recommendation does exactly the opposite.

Bestselling author Naomi Klein calls this economic model “disaster capitalism”, a term she popularised in her new book, The Shock Doctrine.

Klein defines disaster capitalism as “orchestrated raids on the public sphere in the wake of catastrophic events, combined with the treatment of disasters as exciting market opportunities.”

She came up with the term after witnessing the overhaul of the New Orleans public school system in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. This is when public schools in New Orleans were converted to publicly-funded institutions run by private entities.

Instead of spending reconstruction money on improving existing public schools, the government provided families with vouchers, which they could use at profit-making private educational institutions subsidised by the state.

As a result, almost all of the city’s schools were in essence “privatised”, a development that many African-Americans view as a reversal of gains made by the civil rights movement, which sought to guarantee all children, regardless of race, income or social class, the same standard of education.

Kenya, like many African countries, has never quite recovered from the disastrous SAPs. Now, only the rich can guarantee their children quality education, leaving a sizeable majority of children to remain semi-literate in ghettoised, sub-standard public and private schools where the chances of students qualifying for secondary education, let alone university, get dimmer by the day.

The modest educational achievements of the post-independence period of the 1960s and ‘70s (of which I was a beneficiary) have been irreversibly lost.

My recommendation is that the government ignore the expert group report as it is the path to Kenya’s ruin. We need not look further than the Kenya-Uganda railway concession to know that experts with vested interests make the worst advisers.

rasna.warah@gmail.com