🇰🇪 | Why are students in Kenya fighting for their lecturers’ pay? On Wednesday, University of Nairobi students barricaded one of the capital’s busiest roads. Police moved in to break up the protest. The students gave the government five hours to pay their lecturers and called on Education Minister Julius Ogamba to resign. “Our lecturers must be paid. They are our parents,” one student said. Lecturers at Kenya’s public universities have been on strike since October 2. They want the government to sign and fund a new pay deal, and they rejected its raise as too small to keep up with rising prices. Behind the strike sits a bigger question: who pays for public universities? The Treasury has not committed to funding the deal from the national budget. A new funding bill gives lecturers’ pay no clear source, and their union warns the cost could shift onto student fees and loans. Ogamba calls the lecturers’ full demands, about $770m, unaffordable. Yet more than 60% of government revenue goes to paying debt, according to the IMF. The squeeze is global. The UN says 3.4 billion people live in countries that spend more on debt interest than on education or health. And students are pushing back. In Argentina, lecturers and students held a fifth national march this month against President Javier Milei’s university cuts. In France, police have detained nearly 6,900 people since high school protests began, most of them minors. In Austria, tens of thousands marched in Vienna on Thursday against a university funding freeze. In Greece, students chanted for free public education “from Greece to France.” In Nigeria, lecturers at state universities have walked out this year over a national pay deal their state governments have not implemented. In the budget it passed last year, Kenya set aside more for interest payments than for health and education combined.