State to spend Sh90bn to resuscitate collapsing public universities
Education CS Ezekiel Machogu.
The government will this year pump Sh90 billion into higher education, breathing life into 35 public universities that have been bogged down by debts amounting to Sh77 billion.
Education Cabinet Secretary Ezekiel Machugu told a training workshop for the newly appointed Vice Chancellors that the government has an elaborate plan to breathe life into higher education and make funding of university education sustainable.
"The government is set to spend Sh90 billion on university education this year, funds that if well utilised, should go a long way in turning around the fortunes of universities," he said at the workshop held at Sarova Whitesands in Mombasa County.
For close to eight years, public institutions of higher learning, mainly public universities, have not been able to meet their financial obligations due to cash flow challenges.
Universities have accrued debts of over Sh77 billion including unpaid salaries, unremitted statutory deductions, bank and Sacco loans and other pending bills.
Vice Chancellors, however, heaped blame on the government for the financial crisis the institutions are facing, saying it did not provide 80 per cent of Differentiated Unit Cost as had been agreed.
Unsustainable wage bills
For years, Mr Machogu said, public universities have been victims of bad governance that bred financial crisis, which they are currently facing.
“There have been claims that some of the Vice Chancellors have been prefects of the negative trend of promoting negative ethnicity in the universities instead of promoting them as national institutions,” he said.
Mr Machogu noted that in some cases, there has been over-recruitment of non-essential staff at the expense of critical teaching staff, leading to unsustainable wage bills.
He noted that most universities have for long failed to make it to the top charts of world rankings due to weak systems that cannot guarantee quality.
"We cannot continue to condone the situation where our local universities remain at the tail of international rankings. There is a compelling need for our universities to sit on the international charts and give other world-class universities a run for their money,” he said.
At the same time, the CS said the Universities Fund and Higher Education Loans Board have commenced the processing of scholarships and bursaries for all students who have already applied.
“The new model will also eliminate the risk of under-funding universities because funding is student-centred and is based on the actual cost of a programme,” added the CS.
He said the funding will also motivate universities to raise additional resources and enhance the quality of education to attract more students in a competitive environment.
