Show cause letter to all university chiefs

Dear Vice Chancellors of Kenyan universities,

RE: Poor Leadership 

It has come to our notice that you have failed to provide the best possible leadership to the Kenyan universities as per the expectations of your fellow citizens. As a result, university education has turned into tribal enclaves of drudgery enacted by dispirited professors for mostly clueless students.

To start with, you have failed to manage the huge resources at your disposal to provide model instructional facilities and to motivate staff. Even when you have spent money on worthy projects such as buildings, you have exhibited the aesthetic taste of upstart Kikuyu businessmen, and constructed uninspired buildings motivated by River Road architecture. 

None of the buildings recently constructed on any Kenyan campus — save for Strathmore, USIU and Catholic — approximates the artistic majesty of Gandhi Building at the University of Nairobi. You prefer shiny glass towers that look like the headquarters of a stock exchange. 

WHITE ELEPHANTS

In some campuses, there are “enough white elephants to make a herd” as an acquaintance remarked recently at Egerton University, which has uncompleted buildings dating back to the 1990s.

You have failed to put tuition money to good use. The largest universities in Kenya, UoN and KU, reportedly have 80,000 students each.

These students, including government-sponsored, self-sponsored, and those on scholarship, pay fees, which averages Sh80,000 a semester. If there is any student who does not pay tuition, clearly indicate in your response. If you do some rough math, such a university rakes in Sh6.4 billion a semester.

There are three semesters in a year, meaning that tuition fees alone bring in nearly Sh20 billion a year but the amount declared is often a quarter of that.

To that, add research grants and monies from income-generating enterprises, although donors are becoming frustrated by the habit of using grant funds for university operations.

AILING

By comparison, Kenya’s largest county by population, Nairobi, gets Sh12 billion from the government every year. If the governor of Nairobi was managing Sh20 billion a year, as some university chief do, perhaps we might overlook his bling, thug pose and whatever he says he does not drink during working hours.   

With 600,000 university students in the country, in both private and public universities, all paying at least Sh50,000 on average, you can do the math. The university sector in Kenya ought to be awash with cash. However, nearly all universities, including faith-based ones, are ailing.

Clearly, you are not innovative as university chiefs, although innovation is a word often heard in your matriculation and graduation speeches. One of your greatest failures was your inability to predict that the supply of students would reach a plateau before dwindling. You failed to prepare for that eventuality. Instead, you squandered the windfall.

MOTIVATED

You could have used your highly qualified statisticians and mathematicians to model the supply of students deep into the future, the same way you should have motivated and facilitated your scientists to invent patentable and monitisable ideas, or used experts in various university disciplines to create the best universities ever.

Instead, you have opted to disregard such experts and to rely instead on the advice of narrow-minded factotums to run institutions.

Resources-wise, some of the universities you lead, both private and public, are greatly endowed. Some are supported by wealthy congregations or powerful business families, and even private universities are receiving government-sponsored students. 

Amongst the public universities, none has less than 200 acres of land. Some have over 10,000 acres, with chunks of this land being in urban areas where it has acquired great asset value. Others have some of the most fertile pieces of land anywhere in Kenya. Sadly, all this land is either fallow or badly used, at a time when some high schools on barren patches are growing food for their students and generating funds from milk and eggs.

ACADEMIC QUALIFICATION

Specifically, you have completely failed to demonstrate the worth of the highest academic qualification, the PhD, a qualification that is supposed to be the ultimate embodiment of ability. In fact, you have given the PhD such a bad name it is starting to look like a certification for thievery.

The purpose of this letter therefore is to ask you to show cause why disciplinary action should not be taken against you for feigning any sort of leadership quality, and for misleading an eminent panel during your interview for the positions you currently hold. Depending on your response, the panel itself might be asked to show cause why they deliberately hired a pretender to leadership. Your response should reach the undersigned as soon as possible.

Signed: Professors, lecturers and other hewers of academic wood.

Dr Ngugi teaches at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Nairobi. [email protected]