The Kenyan Education ministry has given universities an ultimatum of two weeks to prepare a list of the institutions that will be merged and the institutions that will be shut down.
During a meeting with the vice-chancellors and finance officers from the 31 chartered public universities and seven university colleges, the Education Secretary George Magoha asked the administrators to begin the groundwork for the drastic measures.
Some of the issues discussed at the meeting include pending bills, pension, taxes, debts and Sacco remittances.
The vice-chancellors also told the Education secretary that the new policy is coming from the top and not from universities which ought to have provided “critical mechanism” for the plan.
During the meeting, the Education Secretary Professor Magoha, ruled out any extra funding to the institutions saying they will have to use the 97 billion Kenyan Shillings allocated to them.
The Commission for University Education (CUE) will also submit its report on the merger on the 31st of July 2019, which is different from what vice-chancellors are expected to draft.
At the Kenya Institute of Curriculum Development where the closed door meeting took place yesterday, Vice Chancellors protested the new directive, stating that it was being undertaken without involving all stakeholders.
According to Business Daily, a Vice Chancellor who asked not to be named, said “We need sobriety in this whole process or else we will mess up. We have to involve all stakeholders including politicians,”.
The Vice Chancellors also complained that the government has been “talking to itself” in the whole process and wondered where the students who are leaving secondary schools under the 100 percent transition plan, will go to.
The Vice Chancellors are however expected to come up with the number of academic or non-academic staff to be laid off, the programmes to be merged and the campuses to be closed.
The decision is a huge blow to the more than 27,000 staff currently employed in public universities.
9,000 lecturers are among them.
The Universities Academic Staff Union (UASU) has joined the debate by opposing the new directive.
The University of Nairobi has already identified 20 programmes to be phased out.
