Dear Governor Mandago, Higher Learning Institutions Were Not Devolved

Dear Mr. Governor,
I am writing to you this letter in regard to the violent protests you led against Moi University management for appointing professor Laban Ayiro as an acting VC. You are one hundred percent wrong in that capacity. In Kenya one qualifies to be a vice chancellor of a university not because he is a Nandi or a Kalenjin but because he is qualified in terms of character, experience, academincs, public record and age.

Your behavior as well as the behavior of your flunkeys; Tolgos, Sudi and Isaac Melly in this regard were so un-civil, primitive and uncouth. It is unexpected of you to be such fundamentally chauvinistic in tune with your tribal allegiance.

When we go by the law in the constitution it is clear that public universities and Police service in Kenya are not devolved down to the County Governments. It is a sacred and constitutional right of the citizens or the people of Kenya through the central government to run and make choices about such management of such organizations. Thus, Recognition of professor Ayiro in this respect is an example of such a right.

Therefore, it was not right for you to recruit a militia which you call the ‘Uasin Gishu police’ composed of young and primitive Nandi boys from your village to terrorize non Kalenjin small scale traders in Eldoret town at no other pretext but a claim that they are enforcing registration for business licenses. It is the time you are supposed to accept you political choices to be driven by a conscience that Kenya is a republic not a tribal chiefdoms and hence any Kenyan has a right to live and work anywhere without fear of tribal apprehension.

Your violent agitations and arguments that a Kalenjin tribesman must be the only person qualified to head Moi University, a public and tax financed university makes us the people of Kenya to doubt your academic morality. If your Kalenjin Community was aggrieved by the inclusivity and respect of diversity in the appointment of Professor Ayiro, then you were to go to the court and institute a legal action against the appointing authority, not to carry stones, sticks, arrows and clubs chanting tribal war songs. You have been wrong and misplaced.

Under a similar stretch, I want to teach you something that you don’t know; higher learning and research institutions whether private or public owned do not recognize tribal and ethnic boundaries. For example, your Kalenjin brother is the deputy Vice Chancellor in charge of finance at Kibabii University and yet the local community there does not have a problem, Professor Grace Musilla your fellow Kenyan is the head of the department of Literature at Stellenbosch University in south Africa, Mamdan Mhamood your fellow African has been heading a department in America, Mazrui your fellow Kenyan was the head of the school of global studies at Binghamton Univeristy,Ngugi you fellow Kenyan is the head of translation studies at California university, Achille Mbembe your fellow African has been in charge of a department of political science in one of the top most French Universities and very many other Kenyans and Africans are all over the places away from home serving humanity in terms of education, they do these without fear based on their skin colour,tribe,ethnicity or political partisanship. We don’t know what is so special at Moi University that you don’t want a non-Kalenjin to come near there.

If at all you were a right and honesty leader, you were supposed to go on public protest when Professor Mibey swindled two helicopters from Moi University by allowing mega-corruption in the university that led to a mere accounts clerk to have over thirty million Kenya shillings in his bank account, And yet the external faculty members have not been paid for the past four academic years. You kept mum about this due to nothing else but your strong sense of ethnic sentimentality.

It is on record that in September last year you raided more than a hundred street families in Eldoret by forcefully putting or even caging them into a Lorry, and then ferried them away to Busia-Uganda Border. You only did this out of ethnic sadism that these street families could not speak your Nandi Language. Are we not right to declare you the Idi Amin Dada of the Kalenjin? This tribal hostility you have displayed during your tenure as a governor of Uasin Gish County is not good; it is not good even though you are doing what the people your community loves most.

Stay informed that Laban Ayiro has a first degree in Chemistry from the University of Nairobi, and a Doctorate from American public university. He is not a quack surviving through social crevices of political corruption. He qualifies in all possible capacities to be the vice chancellor of Moi University.

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Articles by Alexander Opicho