Welcome to Kenya, the only place where “higher learning” actually refers to the high-level math required to make Sh3 billion vanish into thin air. While students are busy protesting for HELB and lecturers are shouting themselves hoarse on the streets, the VCs are sitting in their wood-paneled offices playing “find the taxpayer money.” It’s the audacity for me. We’re told the education sector is broke, yet Auditor-General Nancy Gathungu has just confirmed what we already knew - the ivory towers are actually just well-guarded ATMs for the elite.

Take the University of Nairobi, the supposed “jewel” of our academic crown. They managed to spend Sh1.78 billion on “catering and casuals” without a single supporting document. Do you know how many mandazis Sh1.7 billion buys? That’s not a lunch budget; that’s a heist. To do this while the university is drowning in Sh60 billion of debt is a special kind of arrogance. It’s like a man who can’t pay his rent but is seen buying rounds of expensive whiskey at a club in Kilimani.

Then we have the “ghosts.” At the Technical University and Maasai Mara, it seems the payroll is haunted. Millions are being paid to people who probably don’t exist, or for “perks” that have no basis in law. In this country, even the ghosts have KRA PINs and bank accounts. It’s a systemic theft that would make a common pickpocket in River Road look like an amateur. These Vice-Chancellors aren’t educators; they’re feudal lords presiding over a carnival of waste while the common mwananchi picks up the tab.

The most tiring part of this whole circus? Nobody is in handcuffs. We get these damning reports every year, we vent on Twitter for forty-eight hours, and then we go back to our struggling lives while the perpetrators get promoted or “transferred.” The University Councils, the very people meant to watch the till, are clearly in on the joke. They aren’t oversight bodies; they’re cheerleaders for the plunder. They’ve turned public wealth into private playgrounds, and frankly, it’s sickening.

Asking the Treasury for more bailout funds is like trying to fill a bucket that’s been shredded by a chainsaw. You can pump all the billions you want into these institutions, but until you stop the “financial banditry” at the top, you’re just funding someone’s retirement villa in the suburbs. We are bailing out a sinking ship while the captains are actively drilling more holes in the hull. It’s a betrayal of every parent who sold their last cow to pay for a degree that is now being devalued by the very people who issued it.

If you think this is bad, you should see what’s happening in the halls of power where the real “Sodom and Gomorrah” lives. The rot isn’t just in the classrooms; it’s everywhere.

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