By the end of September 2024, atleast 5,000 students attached to University of Nairobi (UON) will be graduating to become relevant and available to the job market.
This is after years of hardworkd and toil, depending on the course and program for every student.
However, it has emerged that hundreds of students from the University are securing backdoor graduation rights, thanks to unscrupulous and corrupt administrators who have mastered the art of doctoring fake success at the University.
Strange, it may not be but the university is yet again on the spotlight for allowing students who haven’t gone through all the necessary course demands and regulations to end up on the graduation list and feast in celebration with the rest of the hardworking lot.
I’m what turns out to be a top systematic secret of unbridled greed, the institution that is ranked best in the country and among the creme dela creme has become a den of corrupt administrators who are ready to aid lazy and incompetent students go through the system.
This happens on a golden plate of bribery, sexual favours and all manner of compromise with willing students working with their vulnerable parents to pay the cheque and get sneaked through.
At the University, their exists a special room named 407 where all these is happening and the ‘clever’ students who know about can go about their other part of life as they wait to graduate without sweating.
A former lecturer at the University confided to the writer that good money is always exchanging hands every year when the graduation time is nearing.
In our possession we have a list of several students, their admission numbers, amount of money bribed, names of university staff and this includes lecturers. The rise in this crime began in 2009.
The evidence also reveals that the university corrupt staff colluded with other branches from Kisumu, Nakuru, Mombasa, and other branches in the country in the scandal mentioned.
Most students who have failed certain exams, have missed seating exams or did not meet the threshold for class attendance can always dance their way at the special room.
“This is happening at UON and I can tell you some of the adminstrators themselves go looking for the potential clients amongst the students who don’t meet the threshold to graduate,” the former lecturer revealed.
He said that some lecturers at the University who are not aware of the graduation scandal have been shocked to see students who did not pass their exams graduate.
“At times you are seated there and you see a student who failed some of the exams under your faculty or subject graduating and you wonder what happened,” he added.
The students who have not been cleared by respective lectures are often the most sought after by this clique of graduation cartel that is in dire need of quick money.
It becomes easy for the female students with good looks if those who have to push them through are men. For their male counterparts, the deeper the pockets the faster the deal.
This cartel involves rogue lectures, heads of departments and sometimes officers from the office of the dean of students.
The University offers over 300 market driven programmes in Healthcare; Engineering; Architecture; Science & Technology; Agriculture; Veterinary Medicine; Business; and social Sciences, distributed in its 11 Faculties and 56 Departments.
It is estimated that every department has atleast 20 students securing graduation through the backdoor.
Sometimes the lecturers or involved adminstrators demand bribes running to over Sh50,000 while some who have emergency cases will take anything from students they have been close to.
Information available indicates that during the 2023 academic year, the university had 49,047 students, of whom 35,897 were undergraduates and 11,003 were postgraduates with over 5000 students graduating.
The university launched several policy frameworks and introduced self-funded enrollment (also called ‘module 2’) to cope with the rising demand for higher education in Kenya.
From this, it is estimated that atleast 10% of the graduates did not merit but made it through.
Despite all these, University of Nairobi was ranked among the top 10 universities in Africa in the just released ranking by Edurank 2024.
It was ranked 1 in Kenya, 8 in Africa and 824 in the world, Makerere University was ranked no. 7 in Africa and 819 in the world. University of Capetown, Witwatersrand and Stellenbosch were ranked 1, 2 and 3 in Africa respectively.
Kenyatta University was ranked No. 2 in Kenya, 38 in Africa and 2230 in the world.
According to the Edurank website, the ranking is according to research output, non-academic prominence and alumni influence.
Over 24.5M citations have been analyzed made by over 1,104 universities from Africa.
UoN scored in the top 50% across 124 research topics.
Edurank’s index has 17,002 academic publications of the UoN and 254, 746 citations, and analysis of non-academic reputation and the impact of 94 notable alumni.
A study shows that every year Kenyan universities release approximately 50,000 graduates into the job market.
In January 2021, Martha was added to this pool of unemployed graduates.
After completing her Bachelor of Science in information Technology (IT) Degree, she immersed herself into serious job hunting.
There have been fears that the Kenyan job market is full of fake graduates and the situation at UON is just but a tip on the iceberg.
