Entry Instance

HTTP 200 OK
Allow: GET, PUT, PATCH, DELETE, HEAD, OPTIONS
Content-Type: application/json
Vary: Accept

{
    "id": 1220126,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/1220126/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 81,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Bumula, DAP-K",
    "speaker_title": "Hon. Wanami Wamboka",
    "speaker": null,
    "content": " Hon. Deputy Speaker, I rise under Standing Order 44(2)(b) to issue the following Statement in light of the now dire need of public universities in Kenya and the need for drastic and radical steps to salvage them. The Public Investments Committee (PIC) on Governance and Education has begun examining audited accounts of among others, our public universities. What has struck the Committees is the fact that in subsequent audit reports, the Auditor-General has found that all those public universities have negative working capital, and no longer a going concern. From the foregoing, on 28th February 2023, we met the Principal Secretary, Higher Education, together with the leadership of the University Fund, Higher Education Loans Board and the Office of the Auditor-General to discuss the following: 1. Funding structures to public universities including sums disbursed in the last five financial years. 2. Capitation provided to students in both private and public universities, including criteria used for each. 3. Law providing for issuance of public funds to private universities. 4. How public funds issued to private universities are audited. 5. Efforts to make public universities financially sustainable. Hon. Deputy Speaker, from our meeting, we made the following observations. 1. The Government, under the Differentiated Cost Unit Model, is obligated to meet 80 per cent of course cost as part of recurrent capitation. 2. The Government has failed to meet this obligation and those disbursed, the amounts have dropped over the years from 66.4 per cent in the Financial Year 2018/2019 to 48.11 per cent in the current Financial Year. 3. This allocation to public universities has been less than half of the requirement with a deficit totalling Ksh164 billion in the last five years. 4. On the contrary, the Universities Fund confirmed having advanced a total of Ksh8.7 billion to private universities in only four years. Whereas the public universities are struggling, they do not have money to run their programmes and they run a risk of being closed, the Government has advanced Ksh8.7 billion to private universities as grants. To make matters worse, those funds have not been audited. The Government has been placing students into private universities and funding them through conditional grants based on their higher fee structures at the expense of public universities. For instances, the fees in public universities is about Ksh16,000 compared to the average private universities which is about Ksh100,000. We do not understand why the Government would want to place poor students in private universities. 5. The Office of the Auditor-General did not audit funds sent to private universities citing capacity challenges and yet, they have been auditing all the public universities. 6. The Ministry has used existing laws, that is, the Universities Act 2012 and the Higher Education Loans Board (HELB) Act 1995, at a free hand to allow placement of students to private universities based on the definition of universities as being both public and private, despite public universities now having capacity to absorb all Governments sponsored students. It beats logic why the Government, through the Kenya Universities and Colleges Central Placement Service (KUCCPS), continually wants to place students in private The electronic version of the Official Hansard Report is for information purposesonly. A certified version of this Report can be obtained from the Hansard Editor."
}