From land grabs to COVID: Managing crises in tough times

The uniqueness of and similarities between universities become evident in times of crisis when institutional contexts, capacities and culture determine how they are handled.

By the time I joined United States International University Africa (USIU-Africa) as the vice-chancellor in January 2016, I had been in academia for more than 40 years in six countries on three continents and the Caribbean region at nearly a dozen universities.

So, I thought I was inured to surprises, but I faced both familiar and unfamiliar challenges over the next six years. But the surprises reflected the larger national and international contexts in which the university operated and revealed our institutional strengths and weaknesses – as crises tend to do.

The sovereignty of nations

The first major crisis erupted while I was in Cambridge, Massachusetts, attending a training seminar for university residents at Harvard.

It was Saturday, 9 July 2016, when I got a message that land belonging to USIU-Africa had been grabbed by a property developer. In my wildest dreams, I had never imagined that, as vice-chancellor, I would be dealing with land grabbing!

The question of land is central in Kenya’s history, political economy and social imaginary. The country’s settler colonial capitalism rested on the dispossession of large tracts of fertile lands in central Kenya and coercive mobilisation of cheap labour around the country.

The struggles over land between the British settlers and indigenous people lay at the heart of the nationalist movement that culminated in the liberation war led by the Land and Freedom Army in the 1950s.

Also known as the Mau Mau rebellion or uprising, the conflict crystallised and unleashed complex forces and negotiations that shaped the trajectory of Kenya’s decolonisation and postcolonial dispensation.

I had done my PhD dissertation on Kenya’s colonial economic history from 1895-1963, so I understood the dynamics of land dispossession, squatting, grabbing and ownership; how land was a source of accumulation and wealth, and a powerful symbol of status, identity and belonging.

USIU-Africa had purchased the grabbed land in 1990, comprising 30 acres [about 12ha], which was not too far from the main campus, from an insurance company that, in turn, had bought it from another company that acquired the land in the mid-1980s from the former president of the country, Daniel arap Moi. It was high-stakes land politics.

Immediately after my return to Nairobi, the management team and I made some crucial decisions. We visited the two nearest police stations and began planning a peaceful demonstration against the land grabbers to raise public awareness. There was overwhelming support from the university community.

The march took place on 13 July. The chancellor, then in his late 80s, and I, together with the management team, led the 6km demonstration on Thika Superhighway from the campus to the Muthaiga police station to deliver a petition. We wore headbands, carried placards and marched under the banner, ‘Our Land Our Future’.

The demonstration was widely hailed as the most peaceful ever conducted by any university in the country. While we were proud of that, we knew the hard work of reclaiming the university’s grabbed land had only begun.

Over the next several days and weeks we visited the ministries of lands and education, organised seminars on land grabbing in Kenya with NGOs, and above all, our internal and external legal counsel began to pursue legal avenues.

The court case moved at a snail’s pace. No legal resolution had been reached by the time I left more than five years later. In the meantime, we fenced the adjacent 10 acres [that were not disputed] to the grabbed 30 acres, and enhanced security for all of the university’s undeveloped lands on the main campus by constructing perimeter walls.

Security was a paramount institutional consideration because Kenya lives in a dangerous geopolitical neighbourhood. The country has suffered several terrorist attacks during the past few years. Consequently, campus security was a constant preoccupation for the university leadership. Regardless of where I was at any time of the day or night, I was reachable by our security team.

Universities in Kenya are expected to maintain and constantly monitor high levels of security. In 2019, following instructions from the relevant government ministries, we established a biometric system for the entrance to campus. We discovered that there were dozens, if not hundreds, of outsiders without campus affiliation who had been coming on campus to use our facilities, including the sports gyms.

Some students protested as these security measures made it impossible for those who had not paid their tuition fees or taken up deferred payment plans to enter campus. On this matter, the board and council unequivocally supported management.

Personally, I was troubled by the emerging surveillance regime but, as vice-chancellor, I was committed to ensuring the utmost security and safety for the university community.

However, I declined travelling with an armed bodyguard or acquiring a gun, despite warnings about xenophobic attacks. I took pleasure in walking freely on campus and in the neighbourhood where I lived.

The wrath of a pandemic

The outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic in early 2020 forced universities around the world to confront unprecedented challenges and crises that simultaneously exposed and exacerbated existing deficiencies and dysfunctions.

Six stand out. First, in terms of transitioning from face-to-face to remote teaching and learning using online platforms. Second, managing severely strained finances. Third, ensuring the physical and mental health of students, faculty, and staff. Fourth, reopening campuses as safely and as effectively as possible. Fifth, planning for a sustainable post-pandemic future. Sixth, contributing to the capacities of government and society in resolving the multiple dimensions of the COVID-19 pandemic.

At USIU-Africa, the management began preparing for the COVID-19 pandemic almost immediately after it erupted. I subscribe to key higher education magazines and, by the end of January 2020, it was clear to me the world was facing a major health crisis.

Management activated the university’s business continuity plan that had been created a year before, set up a task force for COVID-19 and mobilised the occupational safety and health administration (OSHA) committee, and the governance bodies.

We also began preparing faculty, students and staff through a comprehensive communication strategy using multiple platforms and disseminating information from authoritative sources to curtail misinformation and mitigate panic.

A training programme for transitioning to online teaching and learning was launched by the recently established USIU Online. A survey showed 94% of the students had access to smart gadgets.

By the time the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic and the Kenyan government announced the closure of all education institutions from 19 March 2020, we were ready.

The campus closed on 17 March and, the following day, we started offering classes online. The Spring, Summer and Fall semesters concluded successfully online, and we made improvements based on our experiences. This continued for the first two semesters in 2021 while, during the third semester, we partially reopened the campus. The provision of essential services in ICT, library, finance, admissions, counselling and other areas continued online.

The university’s relatively successful online transition can be attributed to four key factors: robust business continuity planning; massive investments in electronic infrastructure in previous years and new investments during the pandemic; remarkable commitment by faculty, students, and staff, facilitated by continuous training; and using experiences to make improvements.

Management and I were committed to managing the pandemic as effectively as possible and plan for the future.

The university became a national leader in Kenya on e-learning as evident in its partnerships with the Commission for University Education (CUE) in organising forums on the subject, CUE’s approval of the first online degree programme in the country at USIU-Africa in 2020, and the university’s selection as a lead partner of the Mastercard Foundation for a major e-learning initiative for some of the foundation’s partner institutions, including 11 in Africa.

I participated in numerous national and international forums on the implications of COVID-19 and began writing a series of papers on the implications of COVID-19 for various aspects of higher education in Africa and around the world.

However, we faced challenges. One was ensuring quality of instruction and delivery of essential services. In the first few months, management and OSHA conducted daily reviews.

Another centred on connectivity and devices for many of our students and faculty. We engaged the two telecommunication companies, Safaricom and Telekom, to provide subsidised subscription Wi-Fi rates.

The integrity of the assessment process posed a special challenge. The schools adopted various mitigation measures, including open-book exams using projects, online presentations and prorating existing assessments. In addition, we acquired appropriate technology tools.

Financial challenges

One of the biggest challenges was financial. The closure of the campus resulted in reduced revenues from auxiliary services and some student fees.

Most significantly, for the rest of 2020, student enrolments fell significantly and, as a tuition-dependent institution, our finances became severely strained.

Enrolments dropped because students’ parents or guardians faced job losses and salary reductions. Further, national examinations for the Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education in 2020 were postponed, so there was no new pipeline for the fall 2020 semester.

Management organised numerous meetings in which the director of finance and I informed staff and faculty, as well as the governing organs, about the dire financial situation we were facing.

We invited the faculty and staff councils for detailed briefings. I spent several weeks calling individual staff and faculty members to find out how they were doing, offer support and solicit their views on how we could catalyse lessons from the pandemic to make the university more resilient and effective in future.

Within months of the outbreak of the pandemic, several council members wanted drastic measures, including immediate salary cuts and furloughs.

Management preferred a measured approach to begin in the 2020-21 budget year to maintain essential operations, morale, and as part of the duty of care to employees.

Unconscionably, when there was blowback from a minority of faculty to measures adopted in the 2020-21 budget, those same council members tried to distance themselves from the budget over which they enjoyed the sole authority of approval, according to the university’s charter and statutes.

Prior to and after the approval of the 2020-21 budget by the council, various consultations and engagements were held with the schools, and the staff and faculty council executive committees to brief them on why it was necessary to implement the anticipated austerity measures.

This was part of a tradition of wide consultations with stakeholders by management as it drafted the university budget for council deliberation and approval.

The measures included graduated salary cuts, suspension of institutional contributions to pension payments, placing some employees on unpaid leave, and suspension of the Employee Tuition Waiver. We indicated that the measures would be reviewed each semester and, based on student enrolment, adjusted accordingly.

In addition, management developed several mitigation measures, such as strengthening fundraising and external partnerships.

It is instructive that we secured the US$63.2 million for scholarships from the Mastercard Foundation that I mentioned in another reflection during the pandemic, and, later, huge support from the Foundation’s e-learning initiative.

Before implementation, we asked all employees to sign-off their approval. The majority approved. However, a minority group of opposed faculty applied for a court injunction to stop the implementation of the measures. They argued that the university had enough resources to navigate the crisis without undertaking any drastic measures. Management believed it had a firm case to prevail in court.

Many employers in Kenya, including universities, had implemented similar measures and so had much richer universities in the developed countries, as I shared continuously in my presentations to faculty and staff.

The court issued a temporary injunction against implementation of the measures and encouraged mediation. After several futile attempts, it was clear to management that the court case should proceed in an expedited manner.

However, some members of the council preferred more negotiations, which persisted for the rest of the academic year. Informed advice from management and the external legal counsel to [the university’s] council hit against a wall because the governance structure appeared to be reluctant to enter into a legal process.

The university continued to bleed financially. By January 2021 nothing had come out of the negotiations and the university found itself in dire financial straits.

The university was forced to undertake two drastic measures. First, dozens of employees on unpaid leave were furloughed. I found this deeply painful.

A suit against the redundancies by the two unions that represented a few dozen staff failed because we had scrupulously followed labour law and institutional policies and procedures. It was the exercise of such due diligence that made management confident of prevailing in the suit lodged by the faculty litigants.

Second, various options were explored to secure temporary revenues to sustain operations, including bank loans. In the end, the Board of Trustees, which has fiduciary responsibility over university assets, approved the liquidation of more than a third of the university’s limited endowment. It had never been tapped before, waiting for it to grow large enough for the conventional annual endowment spending rate of 4%-5% to support institutional priorities such as student aid.

This crisis compromised the university’s financial future. Institutional culture had eaten prudent management and made a mockery of an otherwise effective pandemic management strategy. It was self-sabotage. I was deeply saddened.

Paul Tiyambe Zeleza is currently the North Star Distinguished Professor and Associate Provost at Case Western Reserve University, a private institution in Cleveland, Ohio, in the United States.

This commentary is the sixth of a series of reflections on various aspects of his experiences over six years as the vice-chancellor of USIU-Africa and reflects his personal opinions. The original article has been edited and shortened.