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The 1980s were particularly difficult times for Kenya, crowned by the humiliating spectacle of having to go cap in hand to the Bretton Woods institutions, also known as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, for structural adjustment loans, which led to Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs).
The SAPs particularly affected the education sector and brought widespread hardship into the bargain. In some ways, it was a little like the confidence trick game of Pata Potea.
Let me explain. Pata Potea is a scam designed to swindle pedestrians by mimicking a game of chance. The game, often operated by a coordinated team, tricks victims into believing they can win money by betting on their ability to locate a specific card. The victims or marks find themselves in a rigged game where the only thing that happens consistently is that the tricksters win.
The World Bank and the IMF played a dual role in shaping education in Africa during the 1980s and early 1990s, primarily through SAPs.
Let’s start with the World Bank. In April 1992, the then-Acting Director of Education, Tom Sitima, was reported in the Kenya Times newspaper as having announced that the World Bank wanted the four public universities to admit only 10,000 students for the next five years. Out of this number, Sitima said that 2,000 would take arts-related courses, while the remaining 8,000 would pursue strictly science courses.
This proposal to cap university admissions at 10,000 students annually, with a strict allocation of 2,000 for arts and 8,000 for science disciplines, was emblematic of a technocratic approach to education planning.
It reflected the Bank’s broader development logic: that economic growth and eventual industrialization required a workforce skewed towards science and technology.
Sitima’s announcement did not come from out of the blue. Faced with a Kenyan government that had allowed university enrolment to explode, the World Bank/IMF in 1991 introduced the Education Sector Adjustment Credit (EDSAC). They claimed this had been done to protect the state’s ability to service debt.
As a result, the World Bank mandated a strict cap on university admissions of 10,000 students per year. This was paired with the 80/20 proposal, which specifically targeted the “Arts” card for elimination. They pushed for a ratio where 8,000 slots were allocated to science and only 2,000 to arts.
This was not just about science; it was a way to justify massive cuts to the humanities, which the World Bank viewed as “unproductive” for a declining economy. By “marking” the arts card as a waste of resources, they forced the government to “fold” its commitment to a broad-based liberal education.
As a major financier of Kenya’s education system, the World Bank exercised significant influence over policy decisions, reinforcing the principle that he who pays the piper calls the tune, or to put it another way, financial leverage translates into policy authority.
This development demonstrated the complex interaction between domestic priorities and external influence in shaping Kenya’s education policy during the early 1990s. Policy measures and institutional reforms were not separate phenomena but interconnected responses to a period of economic austerity and structural change.
The higher education crisis of the period can be viewed as both a reflection of, and a reaction to, the broader political economy of adjustment.
Coincidentally, a year before Sitima let the cat out of the bag, there had been resistance to directing students into courses without clear employment prospects during a protest at Moi University.
The April 1991 demonstration by students at Moi University was reported as a protest against the Faculty of Forest Resources and Wildlife Management. However, it was not just about one department; it reflected a broader crisis of relevance within university education.
The students’ main grievance, that they were being trained for jobs that did not exist, highlighted a growing disconnect between academic programmes and labour market realities. Their placards, questioning the value of degrees in wood science, fisheries, and related fields, captured an emerging anxiety about the economic usefulness of higher education.
Taken together, these developments illustrate the complex interplay between domestic priorities and external influence in shaping Kenya’s education policy during the early 1990s. Student protests, policy prescriptions, and institutional reforms were not discrete phenomena but interconnected responses to a period of economic austerity and structural transformation.
These economic issues also seemed to go hand in hand with an intensification of dictatorship and oppression under President Daniel arap Moi’s KANU one-party government.
By late 1989, headlines frequently focused on Kenya’s economic difficulties and its negotiations with international institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank. The government was under pressure to implement SAPs, including reducing public expenditure in education and health.
The arrival of the 1990s and the end of the Cold War fundamentally altered Africa by removing superpower patronage, leading to the collapse of authoritarian regimes, the acceleration of democratic transitions, and the end of apartheid in South Africa. As such, Africans were hopeful for change.
However, this hope would soon be tempered by a severe reduction in foreign aid and the fact that the world was now a unipolar one with the “liberal, free market” USA as the dominant global power.
Of course, the world now knows better. The US may have posed as a liberal market economy, but in fact, it was a mixed economy where substantial government regulation, subsidies, and interventions co-existed with capitalist principles. The US played down this fact when selling its laissez-faire free-market ideas to the rest of the world.
In Kenya, few were prepared for the fact that in this “new world order”, the IMF and the World Bank would be Washington’s enforcers, while our own civil servants and government ministers would be the “useful idiots” used for implementation.
As was the case in the 1980s, present-day austerity measures frequently involve the privatization of state-owned enterprises and the sale of public utilities, intending to reduce government control over key sectors of the economy.
Once again, the burden of adjustment falls disproportionately on the poor, exacerbating inequality and widening the gap between rich and poor.
Rather than resolving debt challenges, these programmes often entrench a cycle of continual borrowing and rising indebtedness, ultimately eroding national autonomy.
Embarrassed at having terms dictated to them by the Bretton Woods institutions, the Kenyan government would sometimes try to make it seem as though it was in charge, even though more and more people were becoming aware of the fact that they were not.
An example of how this worked can be seen in President Moi’s Labour Day 1992 speech, in which he announced an 11 and 12 per cent minimum wage increase for low-cadre workers in the agricultural and private sectors, respectively. This raised the minimum wage in the agricultural sector from 542 shillings to 607, and to 1,000 shillings from 964 in the private sector.
A similar 16 per cent wage increase in the two sectors had been announced by the president in the previous Labour Day celebrations. At the time, President Moi lifted the 12-year ban on the defunct Union of Kenya Civil Servants, which he had imposed in 1980.
The Head of State said the lifting of the ban on the Union was to allow the workers’ body to effectively represent civil servants and trade disputes.
Addressing the nation from Uhuru Park, Moi said the government was concerned that the workers’ purchasing power had been considerably eroded over the past year and that the wage adjustments would go a long way to enhancing the workers’ welfare.
Moi said the government had decided to award a 12 per cent wage increase to the workers whose wages fell under the Regulations of Wages General Order, and 11 per cent to those who fall under the Agricultural Industry Wages Order.
On the recent demands by the World Bank and the IMF that Kenya reduce its workforce in the civil service and parastatals, President Moi said the government would not bow to such pressure.
However, the president said the total wage bill and the rise in the employment level were governed by the ability of the economy to absorb increased labour costs. He said the current population of 24 million was putting heavy pressure on Kenya’s potential for employment. He said, “The high population growth rate has produced a growing labour force that cannot be absorbed by the economy.”
The government and the private sectors would be expected to generate 400,000 new jobs per year to cope with the surplus labour. The president forecast hard times for the 1990s but assured Kenyans that the government would pursue economic strategies that were in the interest of the country. He said the government was determined to foster growth and development in all sectors of the economy.
President Moi said Kenya was operating within the world economy, which had undergone a serious recession since 1989. He said the subsequent implications of a failing world economy were a high rate of inflation, which increased to 5 per cent in 1991, having a direct impact on Kenya’s economy.
The government, President Moi said, had adopted a policy of economic liberalization to boost industrial and commercial productivity. He said companies which wished to increase the salaries of their workers should do so irrespective of the existing wage guidelines. He was responding to a request by the then Central Organisation of Trade Unions Secretary General, JJ Mugalla, that the wage guidelines be removed as they were hurting workers.
By the end of the 1980s, most African countries were implementing the World Bank-sponsored SAPs. At first, the implementation was slow; African leaders were reluctant to expose their peoples to the vagaries of free markets.
Ghana under President Jerry Rawlings, for instance, felt the programmes were harming its people. Former Zambian president Kenneth Kaunda had to shelve the programmes after food price increases led to riots. Other countries, such as Kenya, managed the SAPs by adopting a middle-of-the-road approach.
In 1986, Kenya’s economic policy-makers came up with Sessional Paper Number One of 1986 on economic management for renewed growth. This government blueprint averted a full-scale implementation of the SAPs, at least for a while.
In hindsight, the events of the early 1990s, particularly within Kenya’s higher education sector, were a convergence of economic constraint, policy prescription, and growing social unease. What appeared at the time as isolated incidents, such as student protests, were in fact symptomatic of deeper structural tensions brought on by the Bretton Woods institutions and their conditionalities.
Former US Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Herman Cohen’s push for political pluralism during the early 1990s was strongly intertwined with the concept of free markets and economic liberalism.
As part of the broader post-Cold War US foreign policy, Cohen and the Bush administration advocated for the adoption of a Western-style government and a free-market economic philosophy as interconnected necessities for development.
Writing in Topic, a long-running magazine published by the United States Information Agency (USIA), which ceased publication in 1994, Cohen argued that left to their own inclinations, people choose the free market. He said that if these inclinations were suppressed, black markets and informal economies would arise.
When political change arrived in most African countries in the early 1990s, it came at a time when little, if any, ground had been covered in economic restructuring.
Kenya, for instance, found itself having to manage both economic and political changes.
The “free market” reforms advocated by the US, World Bank, and IMF during this period often took the form of SAPs. Rapid liberalization, as seen in Kenya, led to the removal of subsidies and reduced government spending on essential services like health and education.
These reforms prioritized macroeconomic stability over human development, resulting in high rates of income inequality and unemployment in formerly state-protected sectors.
The transition period saw some of Kenya’s most notorious corruption scandals, which were a reaction to the sudden pressure to liberalize and the regime’s attempt to maintain patronage.
Pressure for reform sometimes led to the deliberate weakening of institutions outside the executive to maintain control in a more competitive political environment.
While Cohen and the Bretton Woods institutions viewed the informal economy as a sign of natural market inclination, its dominance can be viewed more negatively.
For instance, rather than making a choice, many Kenyans were “forced” into the informal sector due to a lack of formal jobs. This sector often lacks the legal protections, access to credit, and scale necessary to drive significant national economic transformation, leading to a “stagnant” experience for many workers.
In truth, the IMF and World Bank were always the dealers at a makeshift table on a street corner. Kenya was the perpetual mark, and the three cards represented Education, Healthcare, and Debt Servicing. They still do.
While the policies of the early 1990s were intended to usher in a new era of freedom and prosperity, critics and scholars point to several negative long-term consequences, or “reverberations”, that continue to affect modern Kenya.
The rapid push for multi-party democracy, linked to US and donor conditionality, often occurred without the prior establishment of issue-based national parties. This is one of the main reasons why today’s political leaders frequently retreat to ethnic mobilization as the most efficient way to secure votes in a multi-party system.
This “ethnification” of politics contributed to cycles of electoral conflict, most notably the 1991–1992 clashes and the devastating 2007–2008 post-election violence, and is already playing out in shaping the 2027 electoral contest.
As of 2024–2025, Kenya has been navigating a severe debt crisis where approximately 70 per cent of tax revenue goes towards debt servicing, leaving limited funds for essential services like healthcare and education.
Some of the ways in which current austerity measures in Kenya mirror the structural adjustments of previous decades include the return of fiscal consolidation, already baptized SAPs 2.0 in some quarters. These include the Bretton Woods institutions being again at the centre of Kenya’s economic management.
Kenya has engaged in several IMF-backed programmes to manage debt vulnerabilities, heavily focusing on fiscal consolidation, raising tax revenue while cutting government expenditure.
Similar to the 1990s, the current regime has attempted to introduce high-interest rates and new taxes, including Value-Added Tax (VAT) on fuel, which disproportionately affects lower-income citizens.
Another major pillar of current economic reforms is the privatization of state-owned enterprises, which, I have previously argued, echoes the forced privatization of the 1990s that left state assets in private hands at low costs.
At the same time, the prioritization of debt repayment over service delivery mirrors the 1990s “cost-sharing” policies and due to debt servicing, public services like health and education are underfunded, leading to reduced staff and a lack of equipment.
Just as in the SAPs era, there is a strong sentiment that economic policy is dictated by external actors, undermining Kenya’s democratic accountability.
