Irungu Munene
19 October 2006
opinion
Nairobi — The ritual drama of a lecturers' strike is with us again. Lost in the cacophony of the impending walkout is a basic reality: reforms in public universities have failed, and the labour dispute is just a symptom of the underlying problem.
Sandwiched in the rising hubbub are a number of myths surrounding remuneration of academics perpetuated by the vice-chancellors committee and the Universities Academic Staff Union (Uasu) officials.
The basic question remains: How do we reward academics competitively without leaving the universities high and dry, financially?
The world of a market university, our new kid on the block for state universities, is a murky one. For better or for worse, the State retreats from the universities leaving them to the vagaries of market forces. The State university is an oxymoron - State-owned, but not necessarily State-funded.
In New York and Arizona, I witnessed State universities realign programmes and budgets, tighten performance and accountability measures, and shed excess baggage as they became mean, lean machines to survive catastrophic budget cuts.
It would be a sign of irrational exuberance for the Uasu officials and the vice-chancellors' committee to negotiate salary awards in anticipation of increased Government subventions.
The last salary increase saw the scrapping of the duty-free car scheme, and left Kenyatta University nearly Sh1 billion in the red.
Our public universities have minimal options but to fully change into market-cum-strategic universities if they are to regain their fiscal health. Navigating the tempestuous waters of the market, including market-based inflation-indexed salaries for lecturers, dictates radical changes.
Arriving at a market rate pay for lecturers means factoring in the base salary, cost of living adjustment, and merit pay. Any exception to the three indices leads to a demoralised staff and wild-cat strikes like the one we are about to witness. So how do we factor in these indices in a Uasu pay deal?
The base pay rate is the starting point in any salary decision. Two questions are germane here: What is the market price salary needed to retain academics at university? For each discipline, what is the prevailing market rate within and outside the university setting?
Addressing this prevents a situation where a professor of medicine, for instance, is earning the same pay as a professor in humanities, yet each has a different market price beyond the university. Little wonder then that the brain-drain is highest in disciplines with high market value beyond the university.
Universities address this by setting disciplinary-based differentiated base salaries for academics: those in medicine, law and pharmacy have a higher base pay than their counterparts in different disciplines.
Base pay is also dictated by "peer institutions" - what institutions of the same calibre in the same region are paying for the same discipline. Peer equivalency is critical in arriving at pay equity.
In this regard, the VCs committee is correct in making reference to peer institutions. However, it fails to factor in institutional and disciplinary differentiation. Different institutions have differing capabilities to finance salary increases.
Cost of Living Adjustment, Cola, is an inflation-indexed salary increment component granted to all academics at the same rate across the board. This portion of salary award pays no attention to disciplinary differentiation because it seeks to cushion all academics from real salary decline due to inflation or recession.
Merit pay is the final component of a salary award. To encourage productivity and to discourage inactivity, merit pay is used to reward those who have excelled in scholarship, teaching and community service.
During my tenure at the University of Nairobi, the "rising tide lifts all boats" principle saw that we all received an equal pay raise, productivity notwithstanding.
For merit to be functional, appropriate measures of productivity need to be developed and the rate of pay increment for this category negotiated during the collective bargaining process.
There is no doubt Kenya's academics are underpaid. However, public university lecturers enjoy higher salaries than their colleagues in private universities. Thus, the Uasu demand for a 600 pay increment defies market logic.
Ultimately, the solution to lecturer pay crisis rests in acknowledging that the market university is here with us and that the transformation of our state universities is inevitable.
Prof Munene teaches Education Research and Foundations at Northern Arizona University, USA.
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