Bachelor of Poverty and Applied Suffrage
When we were in high school, university was sold to us like heaven after suffering. Teachers, motivational speakers, and even older students spoke of campus life with so much sweetness that every exhausted student longed for the day their name would finally appear on an admission letter. They told us university would be beautiful and enjoyable. They painted it as freedom itself-a place without uniforms, bells, punishments, and endless supervision. After years of being controlled, we were made to believe we were approaching a season of independence, happiness, and self-discovery. I remember at Nzoani we said life will be london.
Perhaps that was the first heartbreak. When many of us arrived at Tom Mboya University, we discovered that university is indeed beautiful, but beauty itself does not pay rent. The environment is attractive, the breeze from Lake Victoria is gentle, and the sunsets can momentarily convince you that life is soft. But beneath that beauty lies an economy that feels personally offended by student existence. It is as though the surroundings have collectively agreed that no dream shall be pursued without first paying a tax in suffering.
No one prepared us for the hidden expenses of ambition. Tuition is only the visible burden. The real suffering hides in smaller daily demands that slowly drain both finances and sanity-rent, food, printing assignments, photocopying notes, internet bundles, transport, departmental contributions, toiletries, and those mysterious emergencies that life introduces exactly when your balance begins to breathe. A student receives HELB and briefly experiences financial optimism, only for that money to disappear with alarming speed, as though it had obligations unknown even to its owner. Then begins another education. Not the one written on admission letters, but the one written into our bones. Not Bachelor of Arts with IT, Education, Literature, or Business, but something far more practical and emotionally demanding.
Bachelor of Poverty and Applied Suffrage is a compulsory course. Every student studies it whether officially enrolled or not. Food immediately becomes mathematics. Breakfast is no longer a routine but a privilege. Lunch becomes negotiable. Dinner is treated like victory. A plate of rice and beans is no longer ordinary food but emotional reassurance, proof that perhaps the day has not defeated you entirely. Hunger here is not always dramatic. It is quiet and repetitive. It is drinking water to negotiate with your stomach. It is sleeping early because sleep is cheaper than supper. It is pretending you are fine because your roommate is equally broke and there is no dignity in competing over suffering. And still, academics proceed with impressive indifference.
Assignments arrive consistently. Deadlines maintain zero sympathy. Lecturers assign work as though all students possess stable internet, reliable electricity, functioning laptops, and emotionally peaceful environments. Yet some lessons are online, notes are uploaded digitally, and assignments require portals and research. This introduces one of the cruelest student dilemmas: do I buy food or data? Do I feed my body or feed my degree? Should I eat lunch or attend class properly? The pocket cannot faithfully host both.One cannot concentrate while hungry, but one also cannot progress academically while offline. This is where ambition and biology begin fighting openly.
Love, perhaps the sweetest lie ever told to students.
In high school, they told us university would not only offer education but romance. They promised beautiful girls, natural connections, and the freedom to finally experience youthful love. The beautiful girls are indeed present. That much was true. But what they forgot to mention is that modern romance is no longer powered solely by affection, character, or intelligence. It is heavily subsidized by economics. Love is free only in theory. In practice, it is expensive. Students arrive carrying sincerity, poetry, emotional intelligence, and genuine affection. Unfortunately, across the road stands a flabby, financially established man carrying transport money, salon money, shopping money, rent support, and lifestyle stability. Sugar daddies have entered the ecosystem with superior resources, and unfortunately the heart has become economically literate.
It is painful to watch someone you genuinely care for slowly drift toward financial security disguised as romance. Not because your love was insufficient, but because your wallet was academically honest. What can a comrade realistically offer? The highest amount many students temporarily hold is around twenty thousand shillings from HELB, the far point it can take a girl in the name of dinner is OXA while the busy bodied elements are taking them to coldspring, and even that is not income but borrowed oxygen disguised as financial aid.
Heartbreak among comrades is therefore not always emotional betrayal. Sometimes it is simply economic displacement. Even simple acts of affection feel financially aggressive. Taking someone out for dinner in Homa Bay feels like launching a development project. A surprise gift requires budget approval and perhaps divine intervention. Romance itself has become a luxury commodity.
Here comes the greatest mystery of all: Homa Bay's economy.
There are global economic puzzles, but few are as emotionally confusing as the pricing logic of Homa Bay. Why is everything here expensive? Why do tomatoes behave like imported goods? Why does maize flour carry itself with such unreasonable confidence? Why is rent so offensively ambitious? Where else in the world does a room largely constructed from iron sheets or aluminum partitions command approximately KSh 4,500 per month? Not a furnished apartment. Not a luxury bedsitter. An aluminum enclosure with remarkable self-esteem. Naturally, one begins searching for explanations.Is it because this is Luo land? That theory collapses immediately because then Kisumu and Siaya should be equally ruthless. They are not.
Is it because Homa Bay is near water? Again, impossible. Then why do places like Mombasa and even Kisumu often feel more economically merciful?
Is it because of a university presence? That explanation fails too. Nairobi hosts numerous universities and colleges, yet somehow does not emotionally assault students with the same consistency.
Is it because it has one university? Then why is Makueni thrice cheaper when it has not only one university but a small one; Open university of Kenya!.
Why then only Homa Bay? It remains one of East Africa's greatest unsolved mysteries. Homa Bay possesses a rare equalizing power. It can make even a financially comfortable student feel poor. It democratizes insufficiency. Rich or poor, after a short stay, everyone begins to understand the philosophy of lack. And yet, despite all this, students do not transfer.
That is perhaps the greatest paradox.Because the suffering is not the university but is in the surroundings. Tom Mboya University itself is one of the most student-friendly institutions one can encounter. A university beautiful not only in physical appearance, but also in spirit. A place where students are often allowed to sit examinations despite fee balances, provided they communicate honestly and explain their financial challenges with hope of payment. An institution whose administration responds to student concerns with unusual speed and humanity. A place where lecturers, administrators, and students often interact less like enemies divided by hierarchy and more like members of the same community. A university where one feels seen. A university where lecturers rarely strike even when national unrest affects institutions elsewhere. A university that appears to value students over bureaucracy and learning over institutional ego.
This is what makes the contradiction painful. We are in love with an institution surrounded by an economy seemingly designed to test human resilience. So while we came here officially to pursue our degrees, life quietly enrolled all of us into another compulsory program, not optional, not examinable, but unavoidable. Bachelor of Poverty and Applied Suffrage. A degree awarded to every student who has survived Homa Bay while balancing hunger, heartbreak, online classes, impossible rent, expensive tomatoes, emotionally violent maize flour prices, delayed finances, and still maintaining the audacity to dream. At Tom Mboya University, we do not merely study our courses. We study endurance.
We study adaptation. We study suffering with practical application. And perhaps one day, when this chapter becomes memory and our pockets finally heal, we shall not merely say that we graduated. We shall say that we survived.And in Homa Bay, sometimes survival is the higher qualification but we forces ourselves to qualify, for, nowhere else we can get such a lovely and enjoyable university in the universe, and if it's not, tell me why it has that high population despite the fact it's a young one. It offers quality with care.
