Ghostwritten Degrees: The Rise Of Academic Quackery In Kenyan Postgraduate Studies

By Maina Wahome

Master’s and PhD programs by research in Kenya have turned into a booming business for ghostwriters. Instead of working through the research process, many students are paying others to do it for them. What Kenyan universities are producing are graduates who are conferred with degrees and credited with “publications” but have no real understanding of research methods, the content, or the essence of the research under their names. These graduates own research only by name, not by knowledge. How they pass the dissertation defence remains a mystery. This is a clarion call for panelists to be more thorough and critical during thesis defence. Half-baked graduates should not be allowed to wear gowns and mortar boards or be conferred with postgraduate degrees. They are making the National Commission for Science, Technology and Innovation (NACOSTI) look like a joke. If there is no merit in thesis grade distribution, which is the sole mandate of examination panelists, then there is no point in having several credit hours.

These postgraduate students have become academic refugees, relying on others for research, thesis defence preparation, and journal article publications. A thesis or dissertation defence is not meant to be a performance; it is meant to be a conversation about the research you built, investigated, and proved through data and analysis. However, many postgraduate students treat it like a script to memorize. They rehearse every possible question, follow the ghostwriters’ advice, prepare answers word for word, and then perform nervously before the panel. Once the examiners twist a question or move away from the script, the student is lost. And one wonders: how can you be lost in something you supposedly investigated and presented findings for?

The uncomfortable truth is that many of these students can only be described as academic quacks. A thesis defence should never be reduced to a test of memorization. It is meant to be an opportunity to own your work and demonstrate why it matters. If you truly spent months or years on a study, collecting data, analyzing it, and presenting findings and conclusions, you should know it inside out. You should be able to explain it without panic and even be in a position to educate the examiners on alternative approaches to the study. That is what ownership looks like. You should not struggle to explain what you yourself wrote.

However, what is often seen in Kenyan universities is the opposite. A simple question, such as “Why did you choose this type of research?” can throw a student in a dissertation defence into confusion, leaving them in a state of near-collapse. This is a student who sat through several credit hours of ‘Research Methods’ classes and scored an A, an A grade that cannot be replicated in actual research writing but sits proudly on the transcript. That moment exposes how rote learning, drilled from primary school through secondary school, has now invaded postgraduate halls.  Instead of producing thinkers, Kenyan universities are producing obedient rote learners who show up as mere rehearsers at their thesis defences. That is why, after graduation, many of these graduates cannot produce quality research without external help. In essence, they embody research paucity, forced to lean on ghostwriters to guide them.

There is no pride in having your name on journal articles or university repositories when you know that the research was done by someone else on your behalf, and you cannot even design a topic, draft an abstract, or defend a single decision in your work. That is not research. It is scavenging, living off the minds of those who choose to think, study, and do rigorous research.

A genuine researcher, whether writing a journal article or a thesis, is confident. He or she answers questions without fear because the knowledge is theirs. They are not trying to memorize a script; they are speaking from what they lived through during the research process. The difference is clear: genuine researchers explain with ease and eloquence, while impostors panic and digress.

The scale of this problem is alarming. It is even more troubling when some lecturers, who have no regard for merit, refer students to these same ghostwriters. The real researchers remain hidden, while the students walk away with gowns and certificates. Their names appear across repositories, but their minds remain empty. After graduation, they cannot carry out further research without outside help. They have no lecturer to consult, only a ghostwriter whose commodity is money.

These graduates pretend to own what is never theirs. It is like asking a high school student about a protagonist in a creative book they claim to have just “finished reading,” only for them to admit they cannot recall. In reality, they either never read the book or merely skimmed a synopsis. That is exactly what is happening to research in Kenyan universities nowadays.

This lack of genuine engagement becomes painfully evident during thesis defences. It is prudent to note that answers in a thesis defence should emerge naturally from the student’s own understanding of the research, rather than from memorized responses. Writing down questions in advance, memorizing them, and rehearsing answers during a thesis defence is what I call “postgraduate academic shamelessness.” Why panic if it is your research? If it is yours, then you know it. If you are panicking, then perhaps it was never yours in the first place.

Memorization will always hold you back. It makes you stiff, anxious, and disconnected. Ownership, on the other hand, sets you free. When you own your research, you can explain it with clarity, answer with confidence, and even enjoy the discussion. When students freeze or stumble before a panel, it is not always nerves; it is often exposure. Exposure of the fact that they never truly engaged in the process. They cannot think beyond the memorized answers because they never asked the real questions themselves. Ghostwriters did. This is why “postgraduate academic shamelessness” is not just embarrassing; it is dangerous. It produces graduates who are decorated with degrees but barren of knowledge. Your research is yours to defend, so do it boldly.

Short Bio

Maina Wahome is an author and a linguistics researcher at Diponegoro University in Semarang, Indonesia.