Monday, November 17, 2003
NDUNG�U NJAGA / ACADEMIC DWARFS
More to dons' strike than meets the eye
So much wrath did she evoke from "concerned readers" that the column�s editor had to describe her as the week�s most unpopular person!
Jane may have erred in her wholesale condemnation of the academics, but her concern belies a very serious problem which should not be swept under the carpet.
True, university staff deserve better pay and public honour, but to restore this esteem, we must understand the origin, growth and consolidation of the social ignominy that universities are wallowing in today.
At the start of his administration, President Moi, rightly or wrongly, identified the then vibrant University of Nairobi community as a stumbling bloc to power consolidation. The Government gradually extended its tentacles, ensuring tactical politicisation through such populist programmes as university expansions, research funds and State House patronage for student leaders and lecturers who would occasionally accompany the President on official trips abroad.
Simultaneous with this was a crackdown on lecturers and students who defied this emasculation of the university community into a "cheering crowd" and, in a matter of time, the universities became adjuncts of the Executive.
Having been rendered intellectually servile and politically sterile and pliable, the universities ceased to serve any strategic political value to the Government and they were subjected to perpetual neglect that led to systematic decay and stagnation.
It�s no wonder that all public universities are now characterised by filth, congestion, and collapsed infrastructure which is so easily noticeable from a casual visit to any of them. The poor pay for lecturers is just a tip of this deep-seated iceberg of rot and degeneration.
In the meantime, the politicisation impulse started earlier acquired a momentum of its own and percolated to every sector including academic programmes and syllabi. For instance, the renaming of "political science" department into "Government" at the University of Nairobi was politically inspired.
But the most corrosive impact began to manifest itself when politics superseded meritocracy in staff recruitment and promotions. This is what engendered the then popular anecdote of "Nyayo Professors" who were solely beholden to political connections, corruption and tribalism for their academic ascent.
The academic community then became nothing more than an intellectual auxiliary of the increasingly corrupt and repressive Kanu administration.
When, for instance, pressure mounted on the Government to accept political pluralism in early 1990s, the academic community publicly opposed it, giving a lot of intellectual legitimacy to Government�s recalcitrance and oppression. Even after the onset of pluralism, the same chaps continued to serve exuberantly as Government ideologues.
Last year, for instance, they were used by Kanu to issue opinion polls predicting its victory in the last general elections, in effect pouring scorn at the collective will and aspiration of Kenyans for a change of government.
It is for the same reason that original University Academic Staff Union (UASU) leaders were expelled from the university, as senior administration aligned more with the political status quo than the cause of justice or university welfare.
Although the situation is slightly different today with political divestiture and appointment of more credible administrators, this has not fundamentally altered the institutional essence at the campuses as citadels of academic lethargy and intellectual mimicry.
By the time the Nation unearthed the scandal of fake degree certificates in one university, it was already obvious that academic enterprise in Kenya had gone to the dogs.
When launching the strike last Monday, UASU chairman John Nderitu poked humour by arguing that the Chief Justice can hire four professors as cooks.
This metaphor is quite heuristic at face value, but it amounts to invocation of hollow titles to win public sympathy because we know how most of the titles were acquired. We have professors and senior lecturers at the universities who do not have even a peer-reviewed journal publication to their credit.
In a word, the current strike, though borne of a genuine industrial concern, is at the same time an uprising of the vanguard Kanu apologists who vitiated progressive scholarship at the universities but now seek to reap material esteem for titles that were long bastardised under their very noses.
In doing so, the lecturers are also seeking sympathy from the same public they have betrayed all along by intellectualising and philosophising Kanu corruption and dictatorship that has ruined this great nation.
And for Kanu MPs to come up in support of the lecturers is sheer ideological hypocrisy that amounts to nothing more than the homage vice pays to virtue.
In the final analysis, university staff deserve better pay, but the starting point is to review their qualifications and have all those promotions acquired through tribalism and nepotism revoked so that the new pay perks can go the authentic and patriotic intelligentsia who generate knowledge and ideas.
Taxpayers should not be overburdened to subsidise laziness, mediocrity and plagiarism in learning institutions. If we merely improve lecturers' salaries and leave the broader institutional framework intact, we shall not redeem the dignity and glory of our "fountains of knowledge" and some of us, like Jane Shiko, will forever hold them in contempt.
E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Mr Njaga is a Nairobi-based conservationist
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