A part time Kenyan lecturer reached out to this site’s Chief Editor seeking to have his story of how top Kenyan universities exploit professionals like himself highlighted.
Hi Nyakundi, Part-time lecturers are the most exploited workers in Kenya. They are voiceless, invisible and lonely in their hectic lives teaching at universities.
Universities pay as low as Kshs 25,000 per course that is taught for 4 months and the best universities pay about Kshs 100,000 before tax.
Universities have a very high ratio of part-time workers because university managers have learnt that they can make a lot of money for themselves if they exploit this form of labour and avoid the burden of salaries.
A lecturer who gets paid Kshs 25,000 at MKU will only take home Kshs 17,500 after tax and this money can take longer than a year or two before it is paid. This means that a lecturer works for Kshs 4,375 per month an amount which is not enough to cater for lunch and transport.
Therefore, part-time lecturers working at MKU are forced to use their resources to teach students who have paid the university tuition fees.
If a university is as good as it treats its part-time lecturers then MKU is worse than a Kiosk. Africa Nazarene is second worst, it pays Kshs 49,000 to teach an undergraduate course. After taxes thats Kshs 34,400 which will be Kshs 8,600 per month and this amount is paid after 9 months in most cases.
Now, depending on its location all the amount is spend on lunch and transport and this lecturers taking nothing home. So if a university is as good as how it treats part-time lecturers then this is another kiosk.
Public universities are notorious in exploiting labour from 4th year students, masters students and the most misused lot is PhD students on the pretext that they are being trained. This students are coerced or forced to teach for free by their supervisors and mark hundreds of examination papers without pay and this exercise is very common in all public universities and especially JKUAT.
It is therefore clear that the Commission for University Education(CUE) is busy eating mandazi because clearly they are not doing their work because apart from poor pay they also work without contracts.
The only universities that treat their part-time lecturers well is Strathmore and USIU and anyone can easily see the difference in quality and caliber of students from those two institutions in general.
Workers of Africa Nazarene University have been pushing to get recognized by the university and after the court making orders for them to get recognized the university has not yet signed the agreement.
Please publish this story because the world needs to know.
Parents and all stakeholders need to form strong policies to strengthen the quality of education and overcome cartels formed by university managers to misuse students tuition.
