A number of Kenyan journalists whose master’s programme had taken more than the stipulated two years at the University of Nairobi will finally graduate on December 17. This is happening in the year the UoN threatened to deregister overstayed students.
They will be completing the journey after the UoN revised its thesis or project writing process, including a final defence that is now presented to not more than four dons as opposed to a full house of 10-plus lecturers and fellow students previously.
A provisional list of graduands released by the School of Journalism and Mass Communication shows 33 candidates are eligible to graduate this year. This list will have more or less names, Prof George Nyabuga, the coordinator of the programme, says in a communication to the cohort.
Under three disciplines, development communication got the lion’s share of 21 students, public relations (PR) has eight while communication studies got four.
The candidates were admitted between 2008 and 2018, meaning some will be graduating after 13 years of waiting to get a degree that is now the ticket to managerial positions.
Fred Gori, a seasoned PR man who started off as corporate communications officer at Nation Media Group, will finally get the powers after stopping his studies for more than 10 years, going by his admission number. When he resumed, Gori, a prolific writer and storyteller, who has headed PR desks at a number of organisations, shared his excitement on Facebook.
Some of the graduands completing the journey on Dec 17 joined the programme in 2008. This year, the University of Nairobi threatened to deregister students who had taken longer than usual on the two-year studies.
According to the Commission for University Education (CUE), a master’s programme should run for a maximum five years.
Other scribes on the list are Billy Mutai, Faith Nyamai, Felix Olick, Mugambi Mutegi, Everline Okewo, and Evelyn Situma.
Mutai is a seasoned newspaper photographer who did many years with the Daily Nation but joined the Technical University of Kenya. Nyamai writes Education at Daily Nation while Olick is the Star newspaper political editor.
Mutegi, a former reporter with NMG’s Business Daily, is the Competition Authority of Kenya’s communications and external relations manager since 2018.
Okewo is a communications officer at the CUE but was a Daily Nation correspondent at the paper’s Kisumu bureau while Situma was a Business Daily reporter for many years but is now a communications specialist.
Among other barriers, journalists, especially those working on daily desks as reporters and editors, have consistently failed to complete the master’s programme on time, perhaps finding it difficult to balance between school work and the fast-paced newsroom.
Every year, less than 50 percent of the communication students across universities make it to the tape, hamstrung by a number of hurdles including the lazy supervision of students that occasionally end up in court with the aggrieved winning damages.
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