The financial mess at Moi University, perhaps one of the most poorly managed higher education institutions in Kenya today, is threatening to curtail graduation as final year students await helplessly to be assessed months after going for industrial attachments.
Several sources at the Eldoret-based institution have told Kenya Today the management, headed by Vice Chancellor Prof. Richard Mibey, is yet to release funds to facilitate lecturers to visit the students in their final year who are currently out of the university interning with institutions and organizations as part of the fulfilment of the rigorous academic requirements to graduate.
Recently, Moi University was in the news after Council for Legal Education shut down its Law School for being inadequately resourced and under-staffed to offer law.
In many schools of the institution, lack of learning materials is a historic problem even as the institution receives millions of shillings in capitation to higher education from the government as well as funds collected from its internal revenue mechanism.
Despite the lecturers not being able to assess students because of financial woes bedevilling the university, Â students are required to pay sh16,000 as internship fees, money which the university begins to collect from first year.
The main problem, according to sources, is that Moi is being looted massively. The university may be losing as much as sh50 million weekly through internal non-essential activities often organized by top management where ‘per diem’ and other cash payments can run into a million shillings in allowances daily.
The top management, despite the dire state of the university, can however relax in their laurels, knowing so well that they are protected from accountability foremost by ethnicity but more so because the institution rushed to award President Uhuru a honorary degree soon after being elected to power.
The Vice-Chancellor, Prof Mibey, despite being a good man is a hands off, brains off, everything off kind of administrator under whose watch the university is experiencing a massive cash flow crisis.
Moi long stopped remitting medical expenses incurred by teaching and non-teaching staff as the university does not offer medical cover. The same thing happens whenever members of the teaching staff incur personal expenses on official duties, which has made most lecturers avoid visiting students using their own expenses.
What sickens most is that a number of students will miss out during the graduation because of mistakes of the university.
Several students who have questioned the pathetic state of services in the university have been summarily suspended with the university leading in the number of suspended students in the country. In one swoop, as many as 50 students were summarily dismissed as crackdown on dissent intensified.
Recently students recently started leaving the university’s main campus for fear of terror attacks as the campus, exposed and in the middle of nowhere, is fertile ground for any amateur terrorist.
Two things will have to happen sooner. The university will either be thoroughly run down and shut (the place can be turned into a hotel) or Prof. Mibey and the top honchos will have to pave way for investigations into a scam that may very well sit in the same table with Goldenberg, Anglo-Leasing or Eurobond scams.
Leave a Reply