Makerere could still build for an even more glorious future

What you need to know:

  • Our host had been a Rhodes scholar from South Africa, chased from there because of his young-man kajanja opposing apartheid yet he was himself a mzungu. He beamed when I said Makerere was my undergraduate school. He interrupted the introduction to wax on for minutes about how, for young high-achieving scholars in Africa, Makerere was the place to be in the 1960s. He wondered how it was now faring (I didn’t answer even if I had just brought to an end a four-year part-time teaching stint there). Stories like these still abound in some respectable academies around the world.
  • It is ironical that Makerere has been brilliantly blessed with lacklustre top leadership for many decades. Latest evidence: Vice Chancellor Ddumba Ssentamu’s hysterical interview in Friday’s Observer. It is completely lost on the man that it’s damning of his leadership for Makerere to be closed indefinitely on his watch.

Beyond protecting persons and property, the current closure of Makerere University ought to amount to something. Government officials are telegraphing such intent. But what exactly should happen beyond a commission of inquiry (yawn!) the government is proposing to establish?

As many have suggested over the years, and some are now, the government has to decide what type of university Makerere should be. Makerere should not re-open unless that question is debated and answered clearly.
Should Makerere be just another university slightly better than other run-of-the-mill universities in the country? And now that we have other public universities, should they focus on undergraduate teaching leaving Makerere largely as a research and graduate training centre?

Putting Makerere on a pedestal, to put it crudely, could be worthwhile. For Uganda to be competitive in an increasingly hyper-competitive world, it needs a clear centre of intellectual excellence. It needs an institution of learning where its best and brightest can find ample room and resources to dream, to innovate, to make big mistakes, and to make big discoveries.

For Makerere to re-open to more or less the same state of malaise is not just to doom it further, it is to doom our chances as a society in an intricate world.

Once there is clarity as to the kind of institution Makerere should be, that should then determine the nature of funding and staffing. Of course, there has to be commitment toward the fulfilment of the new mission.
And just to be sure, even if we have an inspired new mission for Makerere, gazillions of cash, brilliant scholars (there are quite a few already by the way), all will amount to little without visionary (that word) and charismatic leadership at vice chancellor level.

It is ironical that Makerere has been brilliantly blessed with lacklustre top leadership for many decades. Latest evidence: Vice Chancellor Ddumba Ssentamu’s hysterical interview in Friday’s Observer. It is completely lost on the man that it’s damning of his leadership for Makerere to be closed indefinitely on his watch. The university should not re-open with this man as vice chancellor, lest the same heedlessness continues.
Thought must be given to how a vice chancellor is appointed. Cliques of senior academics organised around tribe/region and this and that parochialism have often selected vice chancellors whose accomplishment has been to leave Makerere worse than they found it.

The composition of the University Council must also be re-thought. There should be no “potato growers” on the council. People make institutions. Offices are as good as the people who occupy them. Duh!
It is telling, however, that having been confronted by his first academic staff strike in 1989 — just over three years into power — President Yoweri Museveni has failed to ensure Makerere runs effectively. Having concentrated so much power in his hat, Mr Museveni has ensured that every bit of industrial action by staff, or student strike, has to end up on his desk for resolution. The Makerere quagmire is as much his creation as it is of successive vice chancellors. Weak-kneed vice chancellors have ceded ever more power to an already power hungry State House. This destructive dynamic has to end.

The introduction of the chancellor position where the holder is not the sitting president has changed nothing. So far Prof Ezra Suruma is going down the same underwhelming path trod by his successors, professors Mondo Kagonyera and Apolo Nsibambi. By the way, why all these dowdy men for chancellor?
And yet. And yet. In England a decade ago last month, a bunch of us from the Philippines, Russia, the United States, Brazil, Croatia, China, the UK were presented before a distinguished-looking man, the warden of a college at one of the world’s “top three” universities. We were spending up to nine months thinking journalism, debating journalism, and writing semi-academic papers on journalism.
Our host had been a Rhodes scholar from South Africa, chased from there because of his young-man kajanja opposing apartheid yet he was himself a mzungu. He beamed when I said Makerere was my undergraduate school. He interrupted the introduction to wax on for minutes about how, for young high-achieving scholars in Africa, Makerere was the place to be in the 1960s. He wondered how it was now faring (I didn’t answer even if I had just brought to an end a four-year part-time teaching stint there). Stories like these still abound in some respectable academies around the world.
So what?
Makerere can still milk this name-recognition, this “ancient” record of excellence to great benefit for itself and for Uganda. Will the present closure be the moment to turn a corner, to go over the cusp and build for an even more glorious future?

Mr Tabaire is the co-founder and director of programmes at African Centre for Media Excellence in Kampala.
[email protected]
Twitter:@btabaire