Uasu national organising secretary Onesmus Mutio lead University Staffs protesting outside the National Assembly as they present petition on September 24, 2025/ENOS TECHEThere is a philosophical question at the heart of Kenya’s emerging university crisis: What does a society that claims to value knowledge owe those who produce, preserve and transmit it?
The question has become urgent as lecturers in public universities once again stand on the precipice of industrial action, with Uasu’s seven-day notice expiring today, October 2.
To understand how lecturers arrived here, we must go back to November last year. After a bruising 49-day strike, Uasu signed a return-to-work formula on November 5 last year.
Dons returned to their lecture halls in good faith, expecting the commitments made at the negotiating table to be honoured. Central to that understanding was the conclusion of negotiations for the 2025–29 collective bargaining agreement.
But the promised CBA did not follow within the expected timeframe.
Months passed. Negotiations continued but the employer side failed to table the financial counter-proposal necessary to conclude the agreement.
On September 18, the union gave the government and the Inter-Public Universities Councils Consultative Forum (IPUCCF) one month to negotiate, sign, register and implement the CBA. However, realising that the government was not making any progress, Uasu issued its seven-day strike notice.
The immediate trigger was particularly revealing. Salaries and Remuneration Commission informed university-sector unions on September 21 that neither the Ministry of Education nor the National Treasury had provided a written commitment that funding for public university CBAs would come through the National Exchequer.
Without that commitment SRC could not provide the advice necessary to facilitate financial counter-proposals.
This is where the dispute ceases to be merely about salaries. It becomes a question about the philosophical status of the public university and, ultimately, the kind of knowledge society Kenya wants to build.
IPUCCF must answer for its part in the prolonged negotiations. University councils are the employer. If the parties entered negotiations in good faith, why has the process remained unresolved for so long? Why has a CBA whose cycle has already begun remained without a concluded agreement?
The Ministry of Education cannot escape responsibility either. It is the government’s principal policy custodian of the education sector. The National Treasury, equally, cannot treat the financing of higher education as somebody else’s problem.
Universities do not exist outside the national fiscal architecture. If government wants universities to produce the human capital required to transform Kenya, it must finance that ambition.
SRC, too, occupies an uncomfortable position. Its constitutional mandate regarding remuneration and benefits is important, but affordability cannot become a perpetual condition through which collective bargaining is endlessly deferred.
If the government has not established the funding framework within which negotiations can proceed, the resulting impasse cannot simply be placed at the feet of lecturers.
And there is a deeper grievance. Uasu has been confronted with the possibility that public university staff remuneration could increasingly depend on student fees and market-based sources.
The union, through its secretary-general Dr Constantine Wasonga and legal expert Grace Nyongesa the chairperson, reject this, insisting that academic staff in public universities are public officers whose remuneration should be secured through the National Exchequer.
A public university is not merely a business selling degrees. It is a national institution of knowledge. It produces teachers, doctors, engineers, scientists, social scientists, lawyers and countless other professionals. It conducts research that may have no immediate commercial return but whose long-term social value can be immense.
If the financing of such institutions becomes excessively dependent on market-generated income, we risk changing the very epistemological purpose of the university.
Knowledge begins to be valued primarily according to its immediate revenue potential rather than its capacity to transform society.
That is why MPs must approach the proposed Tertiary Education Placement and Funding Bill with extraordinary care. Government has presented the broader tertiary-education reforms as an attempt to streamline placement, loans, scholarships and financing.
But Parliament must interrogate not merely what the Bill says explicitly, but also what its funding architecture could produce in practice.
Parliament
should therefore resist the temptation to treat the current crisis as merely a
question of funding mechanisms. Kenya needs a comprehensive review of higher
education: its financing, staffing, research mandate, governance,
infrastructure, remuneration, student support and relationship with the
national development agenda.
The public, too, must understand the lecturers’ grievance. When lecturers threaten to strike, the immediate image is that of students whose education is about to be disrupted. That concern is legitimate. But the lecturer is not the enemy of the student.
The lecturer is the person standing in the classroom, supervising the thesis, marking the examination, mentoring the struggling student and producing the knowledge upon which professional life depends.
The lecturer’s strike is therefore not simply a demand for more money. It is a protest against a system in which the producer of knowledge increasingly feels like an afterthought.
A society cannot build a knowledge economy while
undervaluing its knowledge workers.
This is why the present dispute should concern every Kenyan. It is about the future of public universities. It is about whether CBAs have meaning.
It is about whether government commitments can be trusted. It is about whether higher education will remain a public good or gradually become commoditised.
