GEMBA - Blank Condemnation not a Solution
I have read in the papers that the Ministry of Education in its wisdom has suspended the award of a degree that most Kenyans have never heard of. This is the GEMBA degree which acronym stands for Global Executive Master of Business Administration.
The GEMBA degree is a relatively recent creation from the world-famous MBA, a degree created in the 1960s to cater for a very special need during those years. During that period, in the United States, it was realised that many of the large corporations in that country were being managed usually by engineers or scientists depending on the nature of the corporation.
While these people were quite proficient in their areas of specialisation, it became clear to researchers in the area of management like Peter Drucker that they really had little or no experience in managing business-oriented processes - like marketing, finance, human relations, public relations, etc. The question that emerged was: Was it possible to set up short term training programs at the masters level that would cater for the special needs of industry in particular? The idea was that managing large modern corporations was too important to be left to engineers and scientists alone.
It was quickly agreed that this type of degree could be designed relatively painlessly by business schools and made available to these scientists either on a one-year basis or two years if they were expected to go back to their work-stations during their study periods. And so it was done and quickly became the hottest product for business schools across North America such as Harvard, Chicago, Columbia, Stanford, UCLA, etc.
Britain and Europe were slow to see their value until late 1970s when they belatedly introduced them in some universities like Manchester, London Business School and a couple in Spain and Switzerland. Some of these have become so successful that they spread their tentacles to India, China and Japan.
We in Kenya were privileged to introduce the degree at the University of Nairobi in 1972 through an association fronted by the Canadian International Development Association (CIDA). The first MBAs were awarded at the then Faculty of Commerce in 1973 as the first masters degree in that faculty. As anticipated, the program became quite popular and has continued to be a "hot" product ever since perhaps too hot for its own good.
Due to its success in Kenya and indeed the whole of Africa, other universities started copying it and, after the proliferation of universities in Kenya, it became a desirable degree for any university worth its name. Unfortunately, that led to its deterioration and decline in quality for two reasons.
One, universities offering it did not have competent academic faculty to conduct credible training programs. Two, some universities started seeing the MBA as a veritable "cash cow" - it was in great demand and was relatively easy to mount in some cases even being taught by part-timers and academics with dubious qualifications.
Enter GEMBA
While the popularity of the MBA continued to rise, two other things happened. One, while there were concerns about the quality and relevance of the standard MBA degree, there were feelings that there were people outside the conventional grazing grounds for MBAs who were in need of that degree and were prepared to pay a premium if the degree was suited to their particular needs.
Two, while these people were ready to pay more, they did not have the patience or inclination to go through a tedious two-year or six semester program. Many indeed were professionals like lawyers and engineers who felt that such a degree would improve their management skills whether in their offices or in public office.
And so it was that in 2006 while at USIU, this writer had a chance encounter with a professor from the Columbia Business School in New York and when I explained what we were going through, he suggested that we could team up with Columbia to mount an equivalent of a similar program that they had developed in their university.
The plan was unique: the students would be recruited by USIU through a competitive selection system and those that got admission would be trained jointly by faculty from both universities here in the Nairobi campus. Then, as they drew closer to the end of the 9-month intensive program, they would spend a month to six weeks at Columbia so as to get a genuinely global flavour. Graduation would follow soon thereafter and would be in Nairobi and attended by representatives from Columbia.
The program worked very well for both universities until it was realised that there were copy-cats locally who were offering similar sounding degrees.
It was through this process of systematic adulteration that an otherwise excellent idea was ruined by these unscrupulous copy-cats so much so that, I hear, they started offering similar sounding "executive" degrees at undergraduate level and, more inanely, at doctoral level. A good idea ruined by typical Kenya greed under the guise of competitiveness.
Quo Vadis?
I hear that the Commission on University Education(CUE) has set up a committee to look at this and related issues in university education. In the meantime, I gather, the GEMBA degree has been banned in Kenya until "something gives".
I can’t wait to see what conclusions the committee will arrive at but this I can say: there is something manifestly wrong in condemning an otherwise excellent training program simply because some spoilers waded in and devalued the currency of a good degree.
As I conclude, I wish to remind Kenyans of a relatively unknown law in monetary economics that says: If two currencies are allowed to circulate in the same market, the weaker currency will systematically reduce the value of the stronger currency until the stronger one drops to the level of the weaker one(Mishan).
And that will be the tragedy of the GEMBA degree in Kenya. I do, however, believe that rationality will prevail and allow a good program to continue to grow. With the necessary controls - accountability and supervision, a responsibility that sits squarely with CUE.
JH Kimura, PhD
17th February 2017
The day I wrote this piece, I was actually quite angry about why the whole matter had become a public issue. If you pause to think about it, the issue was quite simple. To be able to get an MBA one would need to have graduated with a good first degree, i.e., first class or upper second class. Not a degree for your ordinary degree holder.
As a matter of fact, getting a degree in our days was no cheap accomplishment. Even a pass degree classification. And this was the reason
why: only 3% of all students who did the infamous Cambridge school certificate made it to university. Which meant that to go to university, you had to be exceptionally bright.
The structure of education in Kenya was designed to pick out only the very best to go to the next level of education. Thus, to go to fifth grade after primary school, you had to pass an examination called CEE - Common Entrance Examination. If you got a very good grade, you went to secondary school for four years after which you sat another examination called KAPE - Kenya African Preliminary Examination if you were an African.
If you got very good grades in KAPE, you qualified to go to High School where, four years later, you had to do another examination this time called Cambridge School Certificate. In all fairness, this examination was designed in the United Kingdom by Cambridge University. Unlike KAPE which was different for Africans, Asians and European kids, everyone sat the same examination.
Those who passed it very well could go to university regardless of their race. Not an easy achievement. Except that there was only one university called Makerere and it was in far-off country called Uganda where only the brightest kids from British East Africa could go and get a strange qualification called a “degree”....
In short, the very act of getting a degree, any degree, was a significant achievement. Until some lunatic decided that, being merely a piece of paper, any other idiot could get it at a price. And therein lies the tragedy of our current education system.