- Ashford has drawn a parallel between Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s short story “Ghosts” and the decades-long wait faced by Moi University retirees.
- More than 200 subordinate staff retrenched from Moi University’s former Chepkoilel campus have waited up to 25 years for their pension dues.
- Institutional neglect, not bureaucracy alone, has turned retirees into figures the university has failed to properly recognise.
There is a striking connection between Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s short story Ghosts and the recent story of Moi University retirees who have waited for decades to receive their dues. Although the two accounts belong to different worlds – one is a work of fiction and the other a contemporary Kenyan human-interest investigation – they converge around one painful question: What happens to people when an institution forgets the service they gave to it?
In Ghosts, Adichie presents Professor James Nwoye, a retired mathematics professor, as an elderly man trying to survive in the aftermath of a long academic career. One of his immediate frustrations is his pension. He visits the university bursary repeatedly, only to be told that the money has not arrived. His experience is not merely about delayed payment. It is about the indignity of reaching old age after serving an institution and still having to plead for what one has already earned.
That is precisely what makes the story resonate with the Nation investigation into Moi University retirees. The investigation reports that former workers, including more than 200 subordinate staff retrenched from the institution’s former Chepkoilel campus, have waited for as long as 25 years for their dues. Some have reached advanced age while still waiting for money that should have been settled long ago.
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The connection becomes especially powerful through Adichie’s title: Ghosts.
A ghost is someone who exists but is no longer properly seen. That is exactly the condition of many forgotten retirees. They are alive, but institutions behave as though their claims do not exist. Their names may remain in employment records, pension files, payroll documents and administrative correspondence, yet their immediate human reality is ignored.
Professor Nwoye experiences this invisibility. He is a retired professor who has spent decades contributing to a university, yet he must repeatedly return to the bursary to ask about his pension. His education, status and years of service do not protect him from bureaucratic neglect.
The Moi University retirees tell a similar story, but with an even more painful dimension: time has become part of the punishment. A delay of a few weeks is an administrative inconvenience. A delay of 25 years is something fundamentally different. It consumes an entire stage of human life.
A worker who was young enough to be retrenched can become an elderly person while waiting for the same money. Children who were dependent on that worker may become adults. Family responsibilities may change. Medical expenses increase. Economic opportunities disappear. Some claimants may die before receiving what was owed to them.
This is where fiction becomes a powerful lens through which to understand reality
In Ghosts, Professor Nwoye encounters Ikenna Okoro, a man he had believed died decades earlier. The encounter initially appears almost supernatural. But as the story unfolds, Adichie uses the idea of ghosts to explore something deeper: the persistence of the past in a society that wants to move on without resolving its debts.
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The past refuses to disappear
Ikenna represents an earlier generation of university life—idealistic, outspoken and willing to challenge institutional failures. Nwoye himself carries memories of the university before war, political interference, institutional decline and corruption altered its character. The old men are, in a sense, ghosts of an institution that once promised something different.
The Moi University retirees similarly represent the university’s institutional memory. They are not simply former employees demanding money. They are living evidence of the university’s history. They helped build, operate and sustain an institution that exists today. Their unpaid dues therefore represent more than an accounting problem. They raise questions about how institutions treat the people who built them.
There is also a disturbing irony in the fact that universities are supposed to be centres of knowledge, reason and enlightened administration. Yet Ghosts portrays a university struggling with delayed pensions, corruption, political interference and declining standards. The Moi University story shows how administrative failures can have consequences extending across generations.
The two stories also expose the human cost of bureaucratic language
For an institution, an unpaid pension may appear as a file, a pending claim, an arrear, a verification exercise or an accounting liability. For the retiree, however, it is food, rent, medicine, school fees, family support and dignity.
That difference is crucial, institutions deal with numbers. People live with consequences.
Professor Nwoye’s pension is therefore not merely money. It represents recognition. After decades of work, receiving one’s pension is an institutional acknowledgement that one’s labour mattered. When that payment is withheld indefinitely, the message can feel brutally different: you served us, but we no longer see you.
That is why the Moi University retirees’ story should not be dismissed as an ordinary dispute over money. It is a question of institutional justice.
There is another parallel. In Ghosts, the older characters carry memories of a university and a country that younger generations may barely understand. Their experiences are gradually disappearing with age. Similarly, every year that retired workers wait, the institution risks losing not only its obligation to them but also its connection to its own history.
The tragedy is that retirement should be a period of transition from active service to rest, family and reflection. Instead, for some retirees, it becomes another full-time occupation: following files, making telephone calls, visiting offices, writing letters and asking when they will finally receive what they earned.
That is the real ghost in both stories—not the supernatural
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The real ghost is institutional neglect
Adichie’s Ghosts reminds us that people do not simply disappear when they retire. Their needs remain. Their memories remain. Their contribution remains. Their claims remain.
The Moi University retirees’ decades-long wait therefore gives contemporary meaning to Adichie’s fictional world. Both stories ask institutions to confront the people they have left behind.
A university can build laboratories, lecture halls, libraries and administrative blocks. It can produce graduates and publish research. But its true measure of institutional maturity is also revealed in how it treats those who can no longer serve it.
A worker should not have to become a ghost before an institution remembers that it owes them something. The tragedy of the Moi University retirees is that for some, the wait has lasted long enough for retirement itself to become another lifetime of service – to bureaucracy.
By Ashford Kimani
Ashford is a teacher of English and Literature and writes on education and social affairs
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