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{
    "id": 1183420,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/1183420/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 82,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Emuhaya, ANC",
    "speaker_title": "Hon. Omboko Milemba",
    "speaker": null,
    "content": " Thank you, Hon. Deputy Speaker for giving me this chance. I want to congratulate and appreciate all the Members who presented their Statements. I would wish to comment specifically on the one presented by the Member for Kamukunji, who spoke on university education. Unless we take care of university education, it is likely to collapse. I do not think we have a lot of time before it collapses. Maybe, within the next two years, there could be a real challenge. University education was adored in the past. It was referred to as ‘the sacred cow’ of education. At the time of Independence, there was only one university. Above all, we had very many technocrats who were in public service. As the colonisers left Kenya, there emerged the need to replace them with well-trained people, and such people could only be produced through individuals pursuing higher education. Therefore, university education was fully funded by the Government of Kenya. We have economists of education like Michael Todaro, who ranks highly. He talks of the need for the Government to fund education. He attests that the Government tends to benefit more from basic education than from higher education. Therefore, most of the time the Government would prefer to fund basic education more because the benefits to the Government are higher than when the Government funds higher education. Therefore, after we attained independence, the Government of Kenya decided to fund university education because it really wanted to get people to work in the public service. Be it as it may, I want to tell this House that things have since changed. We now have so many university graduates and we do not have jobs to be filled. It is true that at one time, we had what we called the “university boom.” This was when Module II degree programmes were introduced. Module II is what we call parallel degree programmes. The average pass mark for enrolment in parallel degree programmes was so low that it allowed many people to enrol for university education. In fact, universities introduced a methodology of bridging courses for those who did not pass high school national examinations well. The many graduates we churned out of universities, courtesy of Module II programmes, could not get employment because there were no vacancies. That is how we ended up with a boom of university graduates who do not have jobs. Finally, the Module II programme was brought to an end and that is when the rain started beating us. The funds that universities were getting from the Module II programmes stopped flowing in. University funding from the Government was not even as per the requirements of the differential unit cost. The Government was paying less. Now that we do not have Module II students, there is a challenge. I want to tell this House that decision-making is very important. One of the questions that we must ask ourselves would be whether we can sustain all the universities the way they are? That is a political question requiring both political and administrative answers. There are not many students who can fill all the universities that we have in this country. That is a real question that I want the Committee to investigate. I am happy that one of the best committee chairs, the Chair of that particular Committee, Hon. Melly, is in the House. Chairman, are we able to sustain the universities when they are political? They became bedrocks of economic earnings in our own places. It was education versus business. This is a question we have to deal with. One other thing, which is a low-hanging fruit, and which should be undertaken immediately, is why we have sent public students to private universities. That is a dangerous thing that happened. I think it was a form of corruption. We are using public funds to build private institutions. So, when the Committee will be looking at this Statement, in my view, this The electronic version of the Official Hansard Report is for informationpurposes only. A certified version of this Report can be obtained from the Hansard Editor."
}