I read, with sadness, an article by Dr. Simon Gicharu calling for the integration in higher education among East African Community. He argues that integration would tap the best brains in the region and would encourage competition in university education – which is necessarily good.
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From my experience as a lecturer, that promise, which has been pushed in Kenya for last eight or so years, has never materialized. Instead, regional integration of higher education has overburdened lecturers with more management processes and paperwork, leaving them little time to have better impact in the classrooms and research centers, where education and knowledge production actually take place. 

Many years ago, in my moments of pulling my eyes away from my incomplete dissertation, I watched an episode of some American reality court TV. It was probably Divorce Court, presided by Judge Mablean Ephraim or Lynn Toler. In that episode, the judge blasts a young black man for absconding from his family responsibilities because of the difficulties black men face in the US.

I have looked in vain for the episode on youtube to refresh my memory. But what I remember is the judge being flabbergasted by the excuses of the young man. She said something to the effect that her father worked a menial job to put food on the table, even though times for black men were much harder than they are now. The point was that it’s not so much how much a man puts on the table, but the effort, love and consistency with which he does it.