How UASU became an accomplice in lecturers’ suffering

To strike or not to strike is the question that dominated a WhatsApp Group discussion at the University of Nairobi when the national office of the staff union called the recent strike. The lack of consensus among lecturers on whether or not to go on strike doomed it to failure; it was only a matter of time before the Universities Academic Staff Union (Uasu) officials capitulated.

To understand why the strike collapsed, one has to grasp the historical function of the university as engineered by the political leadership since independence and, two, the systemic weaknesses of Uasu in its current formation.

Since independence, the political class never intended the university to be the centre for knowledge production and dissemination; it was certainly not conceived as a space for free thought, but only as a labour factory to yield a compliant workforce that would, in turn, help the political class to achieve its vision. Needless to say, the lecturer was only seen as a little cog in this huge wheel that produced “workers”.

Knowing this, none of the four presidents in Kenya has bothered to strengthen the university institution in any sustainable way. On the contrary, all of them have systematically weakened the university by a balance of coercion and co-optation of critical staff, and tantalised them with the vague promises of appointment to higher offices.

SORRY PLIGHT

This sorry plight of the academic in Kenya worsened during the Daniel Moi regime, when his paranoia after the 1982 coup attempt rendered crippling the university his top agenda.

Not only did the Moi regime impose a climate of fear within the university by detaining some vocal academics and haunting others out of the country altogether; it also tinkered with the criteria and mechanisms of professional growth within the university, creating room for individuals of dubious academic credentials to pass off and be hired as lecturers, promoted to professorial positions, and imposed on their colleagues as administrators.

Of course, Moi was only perfecting what Jomo Kenyatta had begun, if we believe Bethwell Ogot’s autobiography, My Footprints in the Sands of Time. Jomo and Moi were mortally afraid of a strong university with respectable and dignified lecturers who could be role models to the rest of society.

The fear of a strong university and academic is because both can dismantle the carefully crafted myth that the political class is concerned with the economic development of the average Kenyan.

INDEPENDENCE

Because a strong university can certainly disrupt what historian Atieno Odhiambo dubbed “the ideology of order”, all efforts are made to ensure that at no point did the university and its academics as institutions of knowledge attain any level of independence.

So the regimes embarked on systemic crippling of the university by starving it of research funds, ensuring erratic and unfair employment and promotion mechanisms, and alienating gifted but strong-willed individuals from decision making organs within the university.

It is no wonder that, in some public universities at least, promotions and appointments to senior administrative positions depend on political connections, grovelling and lobbying; not entirely on solid personal achievements of research and publications.

This situation is not helped by a historical unconsciousness that Uasu has demonstrated in advocacy, lobbying, and representation of academics.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

Not only has Uasu lost sight of the historical context in which the union became part of the country’s labour relations and academic terrain; more significantly, it has ignored lessons from the pitfalls of its earlier strategies.

Uasu officialdom remains old-fashioned in thought and practice. It is opaque, unaccountable, shockingly arrogant, conniving with university managers, and devoid of imagination when faced with a crisis.

Truth be told, the current Uasu does not represent the interests of all academics equally; instead it conspires with university managers to sell vain hope to lecturers. Uasu, like university management, are both extractionist entities; as the university sucks the strength and intellect of the lecturer for a monthly pittance, the union scams him of agency and membership fees regularly, and without appreciating unique challenges that weigh down the lecturer. 

Nursing the myths of solidarity and collegiality, both Uasu and university management simply ignore the variances in experiences across the country. For instance, if a lecturer at Kenyatta University who lives in Kahawa Wendani earns the same house allowance as her colleague in Alupe University College who lives in Adungosi, what sense does that make? How can I, who spends four hours in traffic every day, earn the same home-to-office allowance with a colleague at Turkana University College?

PRESSING CHALLENGES

The number of lecturers at Kenyatta University, or at the University of Nairobi, is more than the total number of students in some of the universities that handle only a few hundred students, yet KU and UoN do not have any special representation at the Uasu national office; instead the chapter officials from Nairobi and KU are outvoted and out-talked at every turn, despite contributing close to 80 pc of the subscriptions that the Uasu officials live on.

Yet not only has Uasu been deaf to such reasoning, it has also been blind to some of the most pressing challenges that the current academic faces, the most notable being the atrocious medical schemes that expose academics and their families to humiliation in hospitals and cannibalism by health insurers.

UNIVERSITY MANAGERS

By its selective silences, therefore, Uasu has been complicit in weakening the institution of the university and the individual academic.

Because Uasu officialdom and university managers are comfortable, they cannot possibly work to strengthen the university and the lecturer; it is upon lecturers themselves to initiate reforms within Uasu.

Why do we have one union that has more in common with university managers than with lecturers?

The writer teaches at University of Nairobi