The MBA Is Obsolete. Kenya Should Stop Pretending Otherwise.

The MBA is a dead credential walking. It was engineered for a twentieth-century corporation: slow, hierarchical, and predictable.

That corporation is extinct. In its place is an economy run on code, data, and speed. The MBA has not adapted because it cannot.

Its curriculum, its pedagogy, and its status are all built around skills the market no longer values. For Kenya to keep funding, subsidizing, and celebrating the degree is an act of institutional denial. The MBA is not just behind. It is obsolete.

Look at the evidence produced by our own universities. Walk into the postgraduate library at UoN, KU, Strathmore, or USIU. Ninety percent of MBA theses from the last three years are methodologically identical. A questionnaire is sent to managers. They rate statements from one to five. The results are dumped into SPSS. A regression is run. The conclusion is always the same: perception correlates with performance. This is academic malpractice masquerading as research.

Safaricom does not stop M-Pesa fraud by asking staff whether they think fraud is increasing. It kills fraud with machine learning models that flag anomalies across 30 million transactions per day.

Equity Bank does not set interest rates by surveying branch managers on borrower honesty. It prices risk with algorithms that ingest mobile money histories, airtime purchases, and repayment behavior.

Twiga Foods does not order bananas because a manager gave “market demand” a four out of five. It forecasts with data from weather, sales, and historical waste.

The...