Uasu should push for varsities to be research citadels, avoid endless strikes

It will not matter if public universities lecturers go on strike one hundred more times.

The truth is, does anybody really care? We will never ever get that dignifying salary or respectable treatment that every worker deserves.

Believe it or not: The hallowed image of the bespectacled, clever genius only found at our universities died eons back.

In Kenya, we made the situation more pathetic by dishing out as hopeless master's and PhD degrees during the last few years, which everybody now bandies around as if they were magic wands.

As Prof Jenny Lee of the University of Arizona has remarked in a recent Chronicle of Higher Education, nearly all these master's and PhD dissertations may never ever be read or even referred again.

We are a pretty damned lot!

SALARIES
To reclaim even a modicum of our dignity, University Academic Staff Union (Uasu) must now shift focus to more fundamental aspects of higher education reform.

The collective bargaining agreement (CBA) won’t liberate us.

No government will ever spare enough money to pay dignifying salaries to a sector that many perceive as ‘substantially, irrelevant’.

Some of us were the proud founding members of (Uasu).

The predecessor outfit that once featured Mr Willy Mutunga (as he then was) as its secretary-general had long died.

In 1989 (or thereabout), we fronted Mwalimu Mwema Maina (now late) as our founding chairman.

Due to his age and the fact that he counted among his former students our own Prof Francis Gichaga, then vice chancellor, we shielded ourselves — somewhat — from the prevalent vindictive political tyranny of those days.

HOUSING

Dr Korwa Adar came to be the chair thereafter and as many now know, he paid the heavy price of leadership — expulsion and dismissal.

He eventually had to rebuild life outside of Kenya. There were quite a few others at UoN, Kenyatta and Moi, including our erstwhile secretary-general, Dr Kilemi Mwiria, all who literally paid with their blood.

In retrospect, it seems Prof Henry Mwanzi and Dr Eric Aseka (as they were then) were probably right when they vehemently opposed our youthful agitation; declaring instead that labour unions were not really the domain of academicians.

Although we were, and are still, miserably paid — a fact that seems to be the lecturers’ eternal lot — it must be admitted that in the earlier days certain things such as access to health services and decent housing worked well.

MODULE II

The rain really hit us hard with the era of unplanned expansion of universities that completely went beyond the roof with the advent of self-sponsored or parallel degree system.

Although the system opened up the former ‘ivory tower’ to all manner of ‘pseudo’ or ‘would be scholars’, its biggest lesson should be that a university business model built entirely around more and more student enrolment, massification of higher education, is simply a disaster in the making.

In contemporary developmental jargon, it was simply unsustainable.

Prof George Magoha, former head of the University of Nairobi, should be thanking his gods this business model did not entirely collapse under his watch.

For today, top on our list is the urgent need for Uasu to agitate for our release from the morbid stranglehold and the really intoxicating feeble thinking that is really the biggest problem facing public universities.

LEADERSHIP

We all know that the practice of sidelining competence in favour of political-correctness is as historic as it is a well-known Kenyan disease.

Yet, if indeed our intellectuals are worth the papers we daily proclaim, we can face this dragon head on.

Let Uasu begin by demanding for university leaderships that are track-record managers and entrepreneurs; gifted individuals who are daring enough to reinvent the university recruitment processes; capable of transforming training and professional development; improving resources that support high-quality learning and adopting internationally-accepted human resource professional recruitment process.

The orthodox deadwood academic cannot just fit this bill of change.

To continue imagining that once one obtains PhD and has, somehow, worked or even conned his or her way into professorship, then he can lead a university, is a monumental error; only a few can.

BUDGET
With an annual budget of Sh15 billion, University of Nairobi, the oldest higher education institution, cannot convince anyone that it can never get its house in perfect order.

That budget by far exceeds what many of our counties get under the devolved system.

It compares quite favourably with Nairobi County’s entire budget. Not many ministries get even half of that.

A truly vibrant ‘university economy’ can be invented and nurtured by just using the undeniable fact of our revenue potential.

Research and innovation cannot be mere advertising games.

INNOVATION

On the contrary, examples abound of innovators who do things with the resources that are at their disposal.

Pumping colossal recurrent revenue into construction when mortgage options could have served better are classic case studies of morbid and strange decisions that only ‘professors’ can make.

We all so readily yap about Alibaba; Amazon; Yahoo; Google, Uber; the lot who literally had no assets to begin with but who innovated the most talked about multibillion dollar empires in modern history.

One can never understand why all these ‘great’ institutions have no major competitive products within and outside the campus environs.

We can never be convinced that we lack the knowhow with which to turn around our vast farmlands at Kabete and Kibwezi, or at the Coast; or even experiment with precision product factories.

ORIGINALITY

We can pilot plants and exploit our partnership with the Numerical Machining Complex to design, fabricate, assemble and develop manufacturing processes of various types of machine components for oil and gas, measurements, shipping and SGR that would truly revolutionise the manufacturing sector.

We are certainly not reasonable or imaginative enough in claiming with such an unprecedented education-hungry population there are no ready investors, including banks and joint-venture partners, willing to support our innovations and earn ourselves better remuneration.

Uasu must ask tough questions. Why do all our new universities become copycats of the most obsolete and useless practices that the older ones commenced with?

Consider that even though universities are a heavy-duty human resource enterprise, we have no functional human resource departments worth talking about.

WELFARE
Strangely, joining university administration has these days become the new god everyone clamours for.

If the core business of universities is to teach and generate new research, why is it that teaching departments literally have no budgets worth talking about?

Why are there no research offices or support structures at every faculty and department tasked with preparing grant-making proposals?

Why is it that no one bothers about where academic staff work from? And where, really, do our universities spend their budgets?

Whereas we believe Uasu is still relevant, it must pick up battles and issues befitting this age and time.

There are a legion such issues. Chief is our conviction in the possibility of crafting our universities into veritable local economies where such basic tasks as teaching are only a by-product of a massive operation that fully supports itself and pays its staff reasonably if not handsomely.

Dr Outa served as a UN-appointed Government of Kenya advisor and has been associated with the University of Nairobi for more than 35 years. Prof Mulaa is an award-winning scientist from the University of Nairobi, and member of the African Union High Panel on Pan African University Academic Senior Staff Recruitment. These views do not reflect those of the university or any other institution but are entirely independent reflections on how best to deal with the crisis facing university education.