A degree delayed, a future deferred: What universities owe their students

As Kenya's public universities enter another season of silent lecture halls, the question is not only who is to blame. It is what we owe the students caught in the middle.

The silence we should all hear

Grace is in her final year of a nursing degree at a public university in western Kenya. This month she was due to begin her clinical rotation at a county referral hospital, the last step before her licensing examination and her first shift on the wards. On October 2, her lecturers downed tools. The rotation is on hold. So, possibly, is her graduation.

Two hundred kilometres away, her mother keeps a vegetable stall in a market town. She sold the family's dairy cow to clear this year's fees. Every week the strike continues, she sends rent for a hostel room her daughter has no classes to attend and wonders whether the degree the family has sacrificed for will arrive on time, or at all.

On the same campus, the lecturer who teaches Grace community health is on the picket line. He carries a full teaching load, supervises postgraduate students and teaches evening classes at a second campus to make ends meet. He says his pension arrangements are insecure. He did not join the academy to stand outside its gates. He is there because he has come to believe that no one listens until the classrooms are empty.

Beyond the university walls, the ripples spread. A county hospital that planned for a new intake of nurses next year may wait longer, and so may the patients on its wards. Delayed degrees can become delayed teachers, engineers, accountants and doctors for an economy that needs them now. Grace and her lecturer are composites, drawn from recurring experiences reported by students and staff during university strikes. They are illustrations, not claims about named individuals.

This is what a silent lecture hall sounds like.

 Since October 2, 2026, that silence has returned to Kenya's public universities. The Universities Academic Staff Union (UASU), Kenya Universities Staff Union (KUSU) and KUDHEIHA began nationwide industrial action as negotiations over the 2025-2029 collective bargaining agreement stalled. Reporting on 14 October put the number of affected students at about 700,000. The strike and its impact have continued to draw calls for a negotiated settlement.

This is not an isolated dispute. Repeated stoppages have made academic calendars uncertain and turned students into the least powerful party in negotiations that determine when they learn, sit examinations and graduate. They pay for disruption in extended accommodation and living costs, delayed completion and lost certainty. When public universities fall silent, the credibility of Kenyan university education as a whole is at stake.

The leadership problem?

In recent days, some commentators have offered a simple answer to a complicated crisis: blame vice-chancellors. It is an attractive argument because it gives us someone to hold responsible. It is also incomplete.

There is a legitimate debate about how Kenya appoints university leaders. The Universities Act assigns public-university councils a central role in appointing senior leaders and provides for consultation with the Cabinet Secretary and a competitive process. Section 39 also sets out provisions for appointing a public-university vice-chancellor. The statutory framework itself shows why clarity, consistency and institutional independence matter.

So yes: strengthen the appointment process. Make it transparent, merit-based and time-bound, and minimise opportunities for political influence or prolonged acting appointments.

But the answer to a weak process is a stronger process, not blanket condemnation of everyone who has passed through it. University leaders cannot solve structural underfunding by managerial competence alone. Nor does labelling them mediocre put money into lecture theatres, laboratories or staff payrolls.

Breaking the cycle of public-university paralysis

If we want to end the cycle of strikes, we must be honest about causes that sit both outside and inside our universities.

Politics and policy. University financing is in transition. The Student-Centred Funding Model introduced in 2023 changed how public support reaches students and institutions, while continued funding gaps have intensified pressure on universities. Public reporting in 2026 placed universities' unpaid bills in the tens of billions of shillings. At the same time, the Tertiary Education, Placement and Funding Bill, 2026 proposes another major restructuring of the tertiary-funding architecture. How can an institution make credible multi-year commitments when its financing framework remains unsettled?

The proposed Bill is formally before the National Assembly and would establish a Tertiary Education Funding Authority, among other changes. Parliament has published the Bill.

Society. As a nation, we celebrate admission letters and graduation photographs, but rarely ask what happens in between. Public attention to universities surges during a strike and fades once classes resume.

The consumers of education. Parents, employers, sponsors and students understandably want value for what they pay. But a university cannot be reduced to a transaction in which fees purchase a certificate. When numbers matter more than learning, research and formation, the institution loses the constituency that should defend its public purpose.

The university governance gap

We in university leadership cannot point outward alone. Industrial disputes deepen when staff do not trust the figures management presents, when councils and management struggle over authority, when senior offices remain vacant and when difficult decisions are postponed for short-term calm.

Underneath all of this is a question of values and purpose. A university exists to create knowledge, develop people and serve society. When survival becomes the only goal, purpose is the first casualty, and students feel it before anyone else.

Lecturer welfare and academic quality

There is a temptation in every strike to set the interests of lecturers against those of students. That is a false choice.

The current dispute includes concerns about pay, staffing, allowances, pensions and the financing of the 2025-2029 CBA. Reporting on negotiations on 12 October recorded union demands for additional recruitment, promotions, harmonised allowances and funding commitments. The talks ended again without an agreement.

A lecturer carrying overloaded classes across several campuses has less time for research, mentorship and the patient supervision that turns a postgraduate student into a scholar. A department that cannot replace retiring professors gradually loses institutional memory. A talented young scholar who sees no future in the profession may take that talent elsewhere.

An overworked and understaffed faculty cannot deliver world-class education, however good its intentions. Lecturer welfare does not compete with quality. Properly managed, it supports it.

Funding a university, not just a payroll

A university budget is not a payroll. A functioning university must fund staff salaries and benefits; teaching and instruction; research and innovation; physical facilities; student services; administration and governance; and auxiliary services such as hostels, catering and transport.

When institutional financing is inadequate or unpredictable, all of these functions come under pressure. Laboratories, libraries, research, maintenance and student support can be squeezed even while salary obligations remain unavoidable. The dialogue Kenya needs is therefore not about pay alone. It is about what it truly costs to run a university, what level of quality the country expects and how that cost should be shared sustainably.

What a university owes its students during paralysis

Leadership is not tested when lecture halls are full. It is tested when they fall silent. During disruption, every university leader owes students and staff four things:

1. Honest data. Every negotiation rests on numbers: what the institution receives, what it owes and what it can sustainably afford. Where figures are disputed, universities should publish verified information, submit it to appropriate scrutiny and correct mistakes openly.
2. Continuous dialogue. Talks should not begin only when a strike notice lands and end when it is called off. Management, unions and student leaders need a standing forum in which grievances can surface before they become ultimatums. Students, too often the silent party, deserve a voice.
3. Protecting the academic calendar. Students are owed an early written plan explaining which classes will be recovered, how examinations will be rescheduled, what happens to accommodation or other time-sensitive charges, and how finalists will be supported. Rumour is not a continuity plan.
4. Doing all this without vilifying staff. It is possible to defend the calendar without demonising the people who teach it. Threats and public insults deepen mistrust. The lecturer on the picket line today is also the lecturer universities will need back in the classroom tomorrow.

Beyond blame

The easiest thing to do in a crisis is to find a villain. Unions blame management, management points to the funding system, commentators blame vice-chancellors and students blame everyone. Each may hold a piece of the truth. None holds all of it.

What Kenya needs is not a villain but a compact. Government must make credible funding commitments and honour them. Councils and appointing authorities must protect merit, transparency and timeliness in leadership selection. University leaders must govern with honest books and open doors. Unions must bargain firmly and in good faith. Parents, employers and the public must value university education as a public good, not merely as a transaction.

Across Africa, universities are experimenting with new sources of income, research partnerships and deeper ties with industry and communities. Kenya can help lead that conversation, but not from silent lecture halls.

When this strike ends, let us not simply return to normal. Normal is what brought us here. Let us use this moment to build a university system in which students are never again the silent party asked to carry the cost of everyone else's disagreement.

Prof Wakindiki is Vice Chancellor and CEO of KCA University and Vice President of the Association of African Universities