Dead cat in lecture hall: Why varsity strike is a red herring

 

Compromise is not a solution; it is merely a high-interest loan taken out on a future crisis. As public universities across Kenya freeze under the weight of yet another nationwide lecturers’ strike, the state’s machinery is working overtime to locate a temporary “Return-to-Work” formula. We have seen this movie before.

Since the early 1990s, the history of higher education in Kenya has been a cyclical loop of systemic paralysis followed by cosmetic truces. But throwing a few billion shillings at unions to quiet them down for a semester is like pouring water into a woven basket. The state has the data, the intelligence, and the absolute fiscal capability to resolve this crisis once and for all. Why, then, does it choose to grope blindly in the dark?

The uncomfortable truth is that the perennial paralysis of our universities is no longer an accidental failure of governance. It is a tactical asset. In political strategy, a “dead cat” manoeuvre occurs when a government deliberately allows or inflames a shocking crisis to dominate the headlines, successfully deflecting public attention away from far more dangerous structural scandals. By allowing empty lecture halls and stranded students to saturate the evening news, the state constructs a perfect moral shield.

Public outrage is safely redirected away from macro-economic mismanagement, controversial sovereign debt deals, and executive corruption, and placed squarely on the laps of “greedy” scholars. The university strike is the ultimate dead cat thrown onto the national dinner table.

This engineered instability is why the state is permanently obsessed with disruptive, half-baked structural adjustments. Look at the chaotic trajectory of our national curriculum—from the sudden imposition of 8-4-4 to the frantic rollout of Competency-Based Curriculum (CBC) and diverse higher education funding models. These transitions are never accompanied by the commensurate long-term capital required to sustain them. Instead, public universities are forced into a state of permanent administrative whiplash, constantly re-engineering their systems to catch up with shifting political whims.

This chronic whiplash is what directly birthed today’s jaw-dropping Sh100.3 billion public university pending bill crisis. For three decades, every single strike has been “resolved” through weak, short-sighted compromises. To secure temporary peace, the state signs collective bargaining agreements it has no intention of fully funding.

1994 compromise

This forces university management into a corner where they must withhold statutory deductions, swallow pension schemes, and underfund basic research just to keep the lights on. Today’s collapse is the mathematical accumulation of every lazy compromise signed since 1994.

But the state’s strategy goes beyond financial starvation; it encompasses historical containment. We must ask ourselves why the government abruptly terminated the mandatory National Youth Service (NYS) program for pre-university students in the early 1990s. The official narrative claimed it was a budgetary adjustment.

The political reality was far more calculating. The state realised that marching thousands of the nation’s sharpest, most critical young minds through paramilitary training, physical conditioning, and tactical drills created a highly dangerous matrix. When these students arrived on campus and revolted against state excesses, they possessed the discipline, organisational cohesion, and tactical skills to effectively defend themselves against police brutality. By dismantling the pre-university NYS, the state successfully atomised the student body, ensuring that future generations of student protestors would enter the arena structurally disorganised and easily contained by state force.

When you subtract tactical discipline from the students, starve the faculty financially, and keep the administration in a state of perpetual curriculum confusion, you hollow out the academy’s ability to act as a critical foil to state power. The Ministry of Education projects an aura of administrative helplessness, but this is a carefully maintained illusion. Real power rests with the Executive and the National Treasury, which prioritise performative pageantry over the nation's intellectual survival.

Mass intellectual exodus

The socio-economic and psychological burden inflicted on parents, guardians, and students by these perennial shutdowns is an invisible generational tax. Parents pay for empty hostels, students suffer from chronic academic anxiety, and our finest researchers flee the country in a mass intellectual exodus.

We must refuse to accept another temporary compromise that merely delays the problem. The waters of our higher education river have been intentionally muddled to hide the state’s deeper failures. It is time to reject the dead cat, demand structural accountability, and fix the academy's governance architecture once and for all.

Dr B Za’Ngoti is a Lecturer in the Department of Mathematics and Physical Sciences at the Dedan Kimathi University of Technology