Increase lecturers' pay and fund research

Universities by virtue of being the rendezvous of the most brilliant are a nest of innovation and provide the most sustainable and scientifically sound driving force in the economic development of any country. Looking at the Nobel prize winners, one sees a link to their home countries and the progresses that those countries have made in some areas of research, innovation and industrialisation. Many universities in the developed world have memoranda of understanding (and undertaking) with industries to undertake industry-relevant research with very immediate impacts on the agro-industries for example. This is where R & D comes in.

Imagine for example that the moribund Dairy Technology Department at Egerton University is contracted by KCC to work out a problem of solving the problem of seasonal glut in milk supply (which drives down the product prices) and the irony of the lack of milk during some time of the year. Then the relevant sections at Egerton go into project proposals and one such proposal says "Milk proteins can be extracted from milk, processed into powder and exported to China where the products are used for drug manufacture". R & D benefits from cheap and skilled technical input, the students earn their degrees while solving the problem and the trickle-down effect is that the farmer gets a secure market for the product because of the multiplier effect of the project results. In this way, the maize sector would benefit from innovations that convert the product to finished fragments such as starch, oil and other functional foods.

Talk of the oil plants. What happened to castor oil plants and sunflower? The collapsed! This in spite of the fact that the universities teach oil and cereal chemistry up to PhD level. One solution to this problem is to reinvigorate research at the universities and organise the same to be results driven. Then the government would drive more funding to research and although the professors are paid a pittance (like here in China), they make millions through innovativeness and technology transfer.

Another aspect is the need for a complete overhaul of the university research system. Indeed I have been Googling those Professors and students who have been earning their PhDs down there and I am disappointed that there is little to show for their claim to degrees. Where are the publications that show-case their research results? How else shall we know what one has been doing? Weed out the deadwood from the universities, DEMAND that Professors present publications as evidence of their activity and to justify the hefty pay demands and then increase a million-fold the research allocation to the universities. The other option is to assign individual professors respective labs and then contact appraisals each year to confirm if there has been any input from those noisemakers who shout loudest. You would be surprised that most of those professors (I shall be one soon) are saddists ready to visit hell on the students. Clean the universities of dead-woods who cannot publish......Publish or perish should be the motto!