Universities are threatening a national strike over a new way to pay for things.
Student leaders at universities across the country, including private schools, want the new model for paying universities to be thrown out or changed. If it isn’t, they say, learning will stop at all universities across the country.
Other things the students want are for the interest rates on student loans to drop from 4% to 2%.
That was the day before, when students at the University of Nairobi held protests against the new way universities are funded.
The students want the plan changed, if not thrown out completely. They want the last two bands taken away because they think they are unfair.
Evans Serem, a student leader at Kabarak University, said, “We wouldn’t have gotten this far without the new funding model.”
The students are upset with the Means Testing Instrument (MTI) that was used to put them into different funding groups. They say it has a lot of wrong data and doesn’t have enough scoring criteria.
“My comrades were not involved in making this new model… “We need to remind them that they need to invite us to the committee table,” Boniface Ododa, a student leader at KU, said.
They also want to be a part of the broad-based group that President William Ruto said he would set up in June to deal with problems that still need to be fixed with the new way his government funds universities.
If these requests aren’t met, the students have said they will protest against the model at universities across the country on September 9, 2024.
Universities are threatening a national strike over a new way to pay for things.
