World Bank, IMF to blame for mess at Makerere University

From August 2014 until May 2018, I was part of Makerere student politics when I joined to pursue the Law course. But these perennial Makerere University strikes 30 years down the road after the dawn of the Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) shouldn’t take anyone by surprise.

These programmes were sold to the then NRM government that emerged from the bush with literary no coherent ideology of where they wanted to see this country in the long-term. So everything they did from the 1988 currency devaluation to date have been about trial and error. And this is what is reflected in Makerere University.

The government fell prey to the World Bank claims that public higher education has no multiplier effect to the nation. Instead, they claimed that it is lower level education that has bigger multi-plier effects for the wider community.

If the World Bank assertion were true, then why is it that after 30 years since African governments were “advised” to withdraw funding for higher education, the European Union still gives top British universities such as Oxford and Cambridge billions of dollars in research and innovation grants?
No wonder, many top British academics such as Prof Neil Ferguson did not support Brexit, on the sole premise that after Brexit, the European Union would cut funding to top British universities.

The reason the World Bank advised the government to cut funding for higher education and instead fund lower education was due to the fact that lower education consumes knowledge while higher education produces the knowledge.

It would make it much easier to consume Western knowledge produced by top Western universities with little or limited competition locally, if the economy is opened up to Western capital like it is today. These perennial Makerere University strikes from the days of Norbert Mao as guild president in 1991 to date is an indication that the structural adjustment programmes are a failure in higher education and the government needs to change course.

The World Bank has successfully turned most Ugandan private universities and some public universities into glorified high schools. I was lucky to be one of the few students along with the then 82nd guild president Roy Ssemboga Roy that were invited by the presidential Makerere University Visitation Committee 2016 to tender in our views. Our submissions as students representatives were against the move by the university administration, with the support of government, to pull out of what they called “non-core business.”

Non-core business means that halls of residence should be privatised, food out-sourced to private businesspeople and the student only gets knowledge from the university.
This pulling out of non-core business is pursuant to the structural adjustment programme and it has been a spectacular failure in our educational system.

Already, the university investment policy 2006 consolidates these sentiments by clearly gazetting halls as authorised investments as a way of raising alternative income to contribute to the appropriation-in-aid, which is no longer retained by the university, but collected by URA. Clearly, Administration, management and the University Council are unanimous in their efforts to have these halls of residence privatised.

Raising tuition is no solution to Makerere’s needs. There is no university in the world which fulfils its budgetary needs through tuition alone. It will shock you to know that tuition only constitutes 15 per cent of Harvard University’s budget.
Therefore, Makerere University administration cannot say it lacks money to run halls yet the university has chunks of land, among other resources.

Mr Kizito is the head of corporate and legal affairs at Pixan Corporation Technologies.

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