Professors, Promises and the Government's PhD in Deception

There is something deeply amusing about Kenya’s universities. They produce professors who teach critical thinking, researchers who study propaganda, philosophers who interrogate truth, psychologists who study deception, sociologists who investigate group behaviour, and communication scholars who can spend three semesters explaining how a government message can mean everything except what it says.

Then the same professors sit patiently before government promises like village chickens waiting for maize from a man carrying an empty tin.

Perhaps this is why the announcement of another lecturers’ strike beginning on 2 October 2026 has left the public with two emotions: sympathy for the lecturers and wonderment at the lecturers themselves.

UASU says it is striking because the government, university councils and the Ministry of Education have failed to honour the Return-to-Work Formula signed on November 5, 2025, while negotiations for the 2025–2029 Collective Bargaining Agreement remain unresolved. The union also says the Treasury and Education Ministry have not provided a written commitment that the money for the new CBA will come from the National Exchequer.

What the public does not understand is why professors keep believing the same promise after it has betrayed them several times.

Professors of psychology should recognise gullibility; interrogate the proposition; decode the message; examine power relations; examine the numbers; and remember what happened last time. Yet somehow, when the government says, “We shall look into it,” the entire academic village appears to hear, “Your money is safely on the way.”

This is not merely gullibility. It deserves a new academic discipline.

Let us call it Government Promise Hermeneutics: the scholarly interpretation of statements that sound like commitments but somehow evaporate before implementation.

There is also Political Semiotics of the Empty Pot; the study of how leaders can point at an empty pot and persuade the hungry that supper is being prepared.

Then there is Applied Psychology of Repeated Disappointment, which investigates why an intelligent person can be disappointed by the same person ten times and still ask for another promise on the eleventh occasion.

And, of course, Advanced Studies in Administrative Deception, where students learn the ancient governmental art of signing today, postponing tomorrow and forming a committee the day after.

Kenyan lecturers should qualify for honorary doctorates in all four.

Because this is not the first time university staff have been asked to wait. They sign.

And the cycle begins again.

One would think professors would eventually discover that a government signature is not necessarily a cheque. Sometimes it is merely a signature wearing the clothes of a cheque.

Meanwhile, the universities are being squeezed until their walls themselves appear to be teaching austerity studies.

The funding model arrived promising to be revolutionary. Poor students were told they would be supported. There was celebration. There was hope. Parents breathed again.

Then reality arrived...

Students discovered that university life still had fees, accommodation, food, transport, books, and other small necessities that economists mysteriously forget when designing beautiful models in Nairobi offices.

Some students who had entered university through dreams found themselves performing financial acrobatics simply to remain there.

The public had been told that students unable to secure certain programmes in public universities would have pathways into private institutions. But a poor student does not become rich merely because somebody changes the signboard from “public” to “private”.

Class remains class.

A horse remains a horse.

And a donkey entering a horse race does not become a thoroughbred because somebody gives it a university admission letter.

Some Kenyan students have consequently had to improvise survival in ways that should embarrass a country that calls itself an education hub.

They borrow, bet, hustle.

They sell whatever they can. Including the ball and the holy seed...

They turn social media into a marketplace.

They negotiate with relatives.

They wash clothes.

They endure humiliation.

They learn, painfully, that poverty can turn even a university degree into an obstacle course.

And the professors?

They watched the transformation of higher education while their own profession was being progressively reduced from a calling into a monthly arithmetic exercise.

Even the parking lot became a sociology lecture.

A professor arrives in an old jalopy and parks where students cannot see it too clearly.

The tragedy; when a society begins to despise the people who manufacture its knowledge, it has started eating the roots of its own tree.

A country cannot repeatedly undermine professors and its universities and then complain that its young people lack innovation.

And it certainly cannot treat university education as a luxury while political campaigns consume fortunes.

Kenya has documented cases involving forged academic certificates. That does not mean that politicians generally possess fake certificates. It means something more disturbing: academic fraud is real enough to have become a law-enforcement problem.

And when a society begins treating qualifications as decorations rather than evidence of learning, the university becomes the next casualty.

Indeed, the High Court previously nullified the statutory requirement that parliamentary candidates possess a university degree.

There is nothing inherently undemocratic about allowing citizens to seek office under constitutional rules.

But perhaps Kenya should ask a larger question: What happens to a knowledge society when society repeatedly sends the message that learning is optional but power is compulsory?

The answer will not be found in another committee.

It will be found in what we reward.

The government can summon professors to explain climate change, artificial intelligence, constitutionalism, communication, medicine, agriculture and economic development.

But when professors ask for their own agreements to be honoured, suddenly the government discovers the mysterious academic field called Budgetary Metaphysics! The study of money that exists philosophically but not materially.

The professors must therefore decide what kind of lesson they are teaching.

If they stand together peacefully and lawfully for what they have negotiated, they teach students that agreements matter.

If they surrender every time pressure arrives, they teach students that scholarship without courage is merely expensive decoration.

And the professor who sneaks back into class during a collective action is catastrophically sick.

The tragedy would be if a country could repeatedly break faith with its intellectual class and still expect that class to remain permanently grateful.

Professors are not asking the nation to worship them.

They are asking the nation to understand that education is not a sack of potatoes that can be squeezed until nothing remains.

A university is a national memory, laboratory, conscience and workshop.

Kill it slowly and the funeral may take years.

But eventually the country will discover that the people who were supposed to teach its children how to think have been replaced by people teaching them merely how to survive.

That is when the nation will discover the final course in Political Consequences 101.

Unfortunately, by then, there may be no professor left to teach it.

And so, from the village where truth still walks barefoot, the old man has one question for both sides:

How many times can a professor be deceived before deception becomes the professor’s subject? and how many times can a government break its promises before the people stop believing the government’s examination results?

The chalkboard is waiting.

The students are watching.

And this time, perhaps, the whole country should attend the lecture.