UoN denies facing financial problems amid budget cuts

The University of Nairobi is not facing financial problems, vice chancellor Peter Mbithi has said.

He termed media reports that the institution is broke 'to the point of being unable to pay staff salaries' as serious exaggerations.

But he admitted to a steady decline of budgetary support after the Ministry of Education slashed their Sh6.2 billion budgetary proposals for 2017/2018 by Sh1.7 billion.

"The proposed budget cut is premised on the new formula of costing degree programmes called the Differentiated Unit Costs (DUC), which was agreed in principle with the Vice Chancellor's Committee but implementation should have been gradual," the VC said on Monday.

He said the university council has since petitioned Parliament to look into the issue in order to reverse the ministry's decision.

The UoN Council secretary also said that contrary to media reports, the institution has not been censured from issuing Masters and PhD degrees to students who had their theses written by third parties.

He noted that the audit report by the Commission of Higher Education on February 16 did not mention the issue.

Mbithi also said CUE has since distanced itself from the story published by the Standard newspaper.

"We therefore would like to demand an immediate apology from the Standard newspaper for injuring the image and reputation of the university and causing unnecessary pain to our stakeholders through distortion of facts," he added.

He said UoN would take legal action if no apology is offered.

But he also said CUE should issue a public disclaimer on the part of UoN concerning distortions in the story.

The said audit report exposed serious malpractices in some universities, including failure by students to attend classes but are still allowed to graduate.

It questioned the quality of education being offered by some of the county's higher learning institutions.

Individual universities were given the report and asked to respond to CUE within 60 days pointing out any factual errors in the report.

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