Public university lecturers across Kenya walked off the job on Friday, October 2, 2026, after last-minute talks between their union and university employers collapsed, bringing teaching to a halt across the country’s public higher education institutions.
The strike, called by the Universities Academic Staff Union (UASU), came after negotiations with the Inter-Public Universities Councils Consultative Forum (IPUCCF) failed to reach an agreement, with lecturers rejecting an offer of a 4 per cent salary increase.
The industrial action also draws in the Kenya University Staff Union (KUSU) and the Kenya Union of Domestic, Hotels, Educational Institutions, Hospitals and Allied Workers (KUDHEIHA), bringing a wide cross-section of university staff into the walkout.
UASU had issued its seven-day strike notice on September 24, after what Secretary-General Dr Constantine Wasonga described as prolonged delays by university councils, the Ministry of Education and the National Treasury in implementing agreements reached with academic staff.
“We started engaging last year November and we have been patient as a union. When you see us issue a strike notice, it means we have exhausted all the channels,” he said.
The dispute centres on the stalled 2025-2029 Collective Bargaining Agreement, with UASU accusing the government of failing to honour a Return-to-Work Formula signed on November 5, 2025. The union says lecturers in other parts of the public education sector concluded their 2025-2029 CBAs last year, while university academic staff have been left waiting.
UASU says the Salaries and Remuneration Commission has been unable to issue the constitutional advice needed to facilitate financial counter-proposals because neither the Ministry of Education nor the Treasury has given a written commitment on how the agreement would be funded.
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The union is also demanding the harmonisation of allowances and provisions on car loans and mortgages, and wants meaningful participation in drawing up human resource instruments for public universities, arguing this would help protect academic staff rights.
But money for this year’s pay deal is not the only thing driving lecturers to strike. UASU says it has learnt that the government is considering a funding model under which individual universities, rather than the National Exchequer, would be expected to finance national CBAs, with some of that burden potentially passed on through student fees.
UASU chairperson Grace Nyongesa said the approach would unfairly shift responsibility for lecturers’ salaries onto students, while Wasonga maintained that university lecturers remain public officers whose pay should come from the Consolidated Fund or money appropriated by Parliament, not from individual institutions already struggling with accumulated government funding arrears.
The union has also pressed for the Tertiary Education Placement and Funding Bill, 2026, currently before Parliament, to explicitly safeguard lecturers’ pay through Exchequer funding, and has separately raised concern over universities’ growing reliance on poorly paid part-time lecturers, which it says is eroding the quality of higher education, and has urged members to boycott part-time teaching arrangements altogether.
According to Wasonga, Kenya has roughly 9,000 lecturers serving more than a million university students, a ratio he says leaves existing staff badly overstretched.
With classes now suspended across public universities and no resumed talks announced, the strike’s duration will depend on how quickly the government, university councils and the unions can resolve both the immediate pay dispute and the deeper disagreement over who should ultimately fund lecturers’ salaries going forward.
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