I was a first-year undergraduate student at Makerere University when the University Mosque hosted then mayor of Kampala, Hajji Nasser Ntege Sebaggala to talk to us.
The address was mostly in Luganda, and I can tell you, and in his mother tongue, Sebaggala was in full bloom. It was a full course. Sebaggala would tell us that the problem with most university students was that they spend their entire time at the university working exclusively on what will appear on the front faces of the transcripts.
“On the front, your professors write your grades (A+ or A–). But then you forget that a transcript has two faces.” He called them faces, not pages.
“When you come to us as employers, after scrutinising the front ‘face’ of your transcript, we turn it around, only to find a blank space. Don’t be [that] type of student.”
Sebaggala explained further that at the back of the transcript, the student ought to have some own writing. Not grades.
Some writing: active involvement in units such as Nkoba za Mbogo, Banyankore Kweterana, guild elections, religious work, sport, engagements with the outside world. When the employer turns your transcript, they are looking “for their contemporaries you could have met while at university,” who could have referred you to them, et cetera. As is evident, this lesson never left me, and I can tell you, the back face of my transcript was full.
THE LOSS OF CULTURE
While one ought to fully appreciate the vulgarised neoliberal character of doing things in Uganda nowadays – and Makerere overtaken by mini corporations and monopolies – we ought not to lose sight of the fact that universities are not simply teaching institutions.
They are spaces of culture – of social expression and contestations. Over and above, universities generate discourse that stream through supposedly elite spaces. They absorb, consume culture from the margins and make it mainstream.
Thus, all channels of expression ought to be infinitely open, and connections with the general world ought to be strengthened. A university is the final stage in one’s education where at the end of it, individuals are considered ready to join, not just the workforce, but the world as fully formed political and socially-grounded subjects.
Sadly, however, Professor Barnabas Nawangwe, the vice chancellor of Makerere University, and his co-conspirators have killed all these traditions, insisting on just the front face of the transcript.
On the outside – with a wall and newly renovated main entrance – Makerere is sparkling. But on the inside lies a ghost town! The things that made university life complete have all been dispensed with. In Nawangwe, Museveni finally found not just a meek CEO of the Ivory Tower, but a willing ally: university life has been securitised, and free expression criminalised. Even for co-academics!
Consider the guild elections, for example. The procession and speeches, which lit up an academic year, are no more. The Makerere Cultural Music festival, where students organised themselves to keep their languages and heritages alive at the highest level of their student days is gone. The general public freely participated.
The meal halls are now shabby dingies (toninyira) with haggard hands driving in some curious chemical compounds they call food during the lunch hours. The mess culture died. All spaces of student unioning and organising have been securitized. What type of citizens are we producing if not degree-holding menial labourers?!
THE GHOST OF MUASA
It is my tentative opinion that Nawangwe assumed the position of VC without understanding, among other things, the position of Makerere University in Uganda’s political history. He is also unlucky that he became vice chancellor at a time when Museveni paranoia has reached its peak, as the man and his men want to control and eat everything. Otherwise, Nawangwe’s blunders are outstanding.
Conspiring to weaken the university’s major trade union, the Makerere University Academic Staff Association, should be most embarrassing. Had he been smarter, he would have learned from those who came before him that both MUASA and the Student’s Guild protected the position of the vice chancellor. Their vibrancy was his unsolicited fortress.
With a state eternally interested in controlling the most educated space in the country, the vice chancellor remained loyal to his colleagues, not the state. Their co-professors and students were their core constituency. They protected and fought for each other. To this end, whenever the state pushed the VC against the wall, the trade union pushed back, and the students joined in forcing the state to slow down.
Presently, however, Nawangwe is all alone, cold and exposed. He is being tossed about by the state without the traditional shock- absorbers of the office he occupies. And for his cold demeanour and pro-Museveni posture, colleagues despise him. It doesn’t look good. That is because the state has no friends, but selfish interests.
Makerere University is over 100 years old. The people who once occupied those powerful positions say in the 1950s, 1960s or even the 1980s, founding directors of departments and schools – by far more decorated than all the present crop – are all long gone, and almost forgotten. I have heard someone call Makerere University “my university.”
What vanity! As beneficiaries of this prized Ivory Tower, we owe it honesty, straightforwardness and good service. We owe this to those who are coming after us.
Dear reader, as you may have learned by now, the last time this column appeared, it bruised the egos of some folks high up in Makerere University. I had expected some push back – as has happened before – but I was also shocked by how poorly-crafted it came. I expected some panache. Our friends simply proved my claims that they are fast turning Makerere into a glorified secondary school.
The vice chancellor, Prof Nawangwe, seems content with discarding all professorial finesse so as to blend with the crowd of Captains and Privates.
STILL BASED AT MISR
Dear reader, I will not bother you with such a small issue, which is clearly meant to derail us. All I can say is that I am still based at Makerere Institute of Social Research (MISR), where I have taught before as part of my graduate work, and I am still pursuing my PhD – and this will be my second doctoral degree, in shaa Allah.
But why do I write – for extended weeks – about Makerere University? What is in it for me, someone may ask. First, a good turn deserves another: I consider myself a beneficiary of this public institution, educated on the taxpayer’s purse. Makerere has produced many, many wonderful folks, and I am one of them.
I know, it sounds arrogant, but this awareness gives me the oomph to return the favour. I am a proud product of the department of Literature; the department of Music, Dance and Drama; Makerere Institute of Social Research (MISR), and the Makerere University Mosque.
These four spaces combined gave me identity as a conscious political-social subject, and a man of letters. And for five years as one of the editors of Fountain Publishers, whose offices for years were located inside Makerere, I learned a great deal about this place, and its peoples.
Thus, I owe Makerere a good turn. And it is my sobering opinion that rigorous, progressive, consistent critique of the institutions we love (and even the individuals dear to us) enables them to keep their pH in good balance. Anti ensowera ekwagala, yekugwa ku bbwa (The fly that loves you is the one that drops on your wound).”
Sadly, in these times, the speed of depreciation, and levels of abuse and aloofness do not allow us to write poetry about our Makerere. But, rather, songs of mourning and sadness.
The author is a political theorist based at Makerere University.