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"id": 686476,
"url": "http://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/686476/?format=api",
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"type": "speech",
"speaker_name": "Hon. H.K. Njuguna",
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"speaker": {
"id": 1508,
"legal_name": "Humphrey Kimani Njuguna",
"slug": "humphrey-kimani-njuguna"
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"content": "I support this Bill, first of all, as an academician. I have spent more than 20 years in the university. I am still a student and, hopefully, I will graduate with my second doctorate degree at the end of this year. Perhaps, I am addressing this House because I went to university. We are all beneficiaries of education and education is a major indicator of development in any nation. When I went to the University of Nairobi (UoN) for my first degree, the number of students who were admitted was 1,500. At that time, it was only the UoN that was in existence. Kenyatta University was then a constituent college of the university. I remember many students used to go outside this country for further education. Indeed, this country used to lose a lot of foreign exchange. However, years later, we have many universities in this country and Kenya is saving a lot of foreign exchange. The fact that we are now debating amendments to the Universities Act, we are recognising that we have had a problem in our expansion of our university education. Universities have mushroomed. You go to every town and you find a university. As much as we support the expansion of our university education, I think we are admitting there is a problem with the mushrooming of universities. We have a problem with the quality of our education. As much as we are not derailing expansion, we are saying that there is a problem. Some of us who are employers at times doubt when we employ the students from our universities. Have they gone through the requisite programmes? They look like they are half-baked. What has gone wrong? I want to go on record as one of the Members who support this Bill that talks about regulations. Something ought to be done. I have listened to some of the Members’ contributions and I support them. I do not see any reason why Kenyatta University should not have specialised in education. I do not see why Egerton University should not have specialised in matters of agriculture because that is the foundation of Egerton University. I do not see why the UoN should not have specialised in their core areas like medicine, architecture, design and development and so on. Because the statute requires universities to have, at least, 25 acres of land we have seen crowded institutions, say, in Nairobi City, buy land somewhere else, say, in Kitengela, just to cheat Kenyans that they have met the requirements. We are concerned with the quality of papers from our universities. We are saying that, perhaps, we should downsize our universities. When one lecturer traverses across a number of universities, say, Karatina University, Moi University in Eldoret and another one in Mombasa, you really wonder if, indeed, they have time to prepare for teaching. There is a problem. Do we also consider the lecturer-student ratio? This is because in some cases, you will find a lecturer teaching over 1,000 students in a lecture hall. At our time, we used to have a professor and also tutorial fellows or what we call assistant lecturers. These days, that quality is not there. A professor is the assistant lecturer and the tutorial fellow. You do not even know when there is plagiarism because you do not know whether the students are doing the assignments on their own or they are being done by somebody else. We are concerned with the quality of our university education. There is a time when you could say that you are from the UoN and even graduates from Harvard University would respect you. Let us not go to a situation where we are just presenting papers. The situation we are headed to is one where, once you tell people that you are from a Kenyan university, they start doubting your papers. We want Kenyan academic papers to be respected the way they were respected those years. I strongly believe in investing in the lives of our children as opposed to investing for our children. When we invest in education, we invest in the lives of our children. It is important because one of the biggest budget allocations in this country is on education. Even as parents,"
}