Ugandans-At-Heart

BYYAHYA SSEREMBA
The Campus Journal

Setting up a university on Ugandan soil seems to be as easy as starting a pay-phone kiosk alongside the road. At Muteesa I Royal University (MRU), students attend lectures under trees and tents.

Named after a cunning ruler who employed both collaboration and resistance to try to outmanoeuvre British colonialists, MRU emerged in 2007 from a technical institute that Uganda’s central tribe had shortly regained from the central government. Hankering after their pre-colonial might, the Baganda have untiringly demanded for a federal status, which would give them some autonomy to make legislations, collect taxes and run their schools.

But the state of their university is pitiful. When all the four improvised tents are filled, classes are taken under trees scattered around the main campus at Mengo, just meters away from the headquarters of their kingdom. The university has only three buildings – each the size of two buses – housing the administrations of the university and a technical school, a computer laboratory meant for 20 users and an almost empty space called library.

“Each semester we pay [Shillings] 30,000 for library but our lecturer still sneaks in Makerere University library to make photocopies of textbooks,” a second year business management student said as he lifted a plastic bowl of beans soup to his mouth inside a jam-packed dormitory. For fear of reprisal, he, like all students interviewed in this story, preferred anonymity.

In a letter pinned on the university notice board dated 11, March 2009, the Vice Chancellor Prof. Elijah Ssemakula told students that there were no books because “procurement of the relevant textbooks is a lengthy process.”

Kevin Musoke (not real name), one of the pioneer students and a committed member of the Nkoba Zambogo, a hard-line youth association that espouses Buganda’s interests, was delighted to hear that his kingdom had opened a university. But he shed tears when he found classrooms overrun by mud whenever it rained.

At their second campus in Masaka, several lecturers recently stopped teaching because they did not know who was supposed to pay them. “They kept us walking from office to office fooling us,” one of the lecturers told The Campus Journal.

Conditions at the Kabaka’s university mirror a wider mess in Uganda’s academia. The lucrative school business prompts greedy capitalists to open up academic institutions without even the most basic requirements. In many secondary schools, Chemistry students meet a test-tube for the first time during their final national examinations.

The situation worsened when the central government introduced Universal Primary (and later Secondary) Education which required public schools to admit students without logical limit, suffocating their ability to offer quality education. Twelve years after the birth of the poorly-executed education policy, high schools are producing students who struggle to construct a sentence. Desperate for students, ill-equipped universities like Mutesa I become the destinations for such students whose poor grades do not allow them space in genuine universities.

Ending up in the likes of the Kabaka’s university, the students encounter ill-trained, ill-paid part-time lecturers; empty libraries and barely functioning computers — hammering the final nail in their education coffin.

The good news would have been that the university is run by Uganda’s largest kingdom, which is able to fundraise for its institutions as witnessed when it successfully begged for hundreds of millions of shillings from impoverished peasants to organise the Kabaka’s wedding. But even when funds are raised through such means or generated from the kingdom’s numerous investments, little development is seen.

The revenue is controlled by a handful of tribal chiefs whose accountability to the people is a taboo. They are steadfast in trying to make the Baganda believe that demanding to know how public resources are spent amounts to belittling the Kabaka. Among the Kabaka’s most pronounced attributes are Taddibwaamu (not answerable), Tatunulwa mu kamwa (totalitarian) and Nantawetwa (hard-nosed). This disregard for transparency and answerability entrenched in the Mengo administration is no incentive to spending Buganda’s resources in a manner that benefits the Baganda, a situation that explains the hunger starving lecturers at their university.

But the administration of the university is full of resilience, hoping that one day the difficult situation shall come to pass. The Vice Chancellor says that the institution is trying to acquire the “necessary facilities as mandated by the National Council for Higher Education in order to meet the quality assurance standards”. The standards, he believes, shall be achieved if students continue paying an annual development fee of Shillings 60,000, in addition to First Aid fee of 40,000 per semester.

But as academic experts observe, it is naïve to think that a university can thrive only on fees collected from students. If MRU is to register any significant improvements, the kingdom shall find robust ways of funding the academic institution.

As I walk out of the gates of Muteesa I Kakeeka Campus, I observe again a large poster bearing a picture of a lion, a shield and two spears symbolising the kingdom’s pre-colonial military might and, perhaps, its surviving kingmaker influence in national politics.

“Mutesa I Royal University – Seeking Greater Horizons in Thought and Action,” reads the poster, boldly flattering the university.

This story was written in 2009.

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Dear Readers

Kabalega Secondary School popularly known as KABASCO is one of the old schools in Uganda.This school is located in Masindi District. It used to be a good school, and indeed it still is, though the teachers are now demoralised as they have never been paid their salaries since February 2011.

Its allaged that the Headmaster diverted staff salaries into campaigns which took place in February this year.

These teachers, have families, which are suffering, their children are no longer going to school, to mention a few of the broblems the teachers are facing. They are leaving in a state of fear that they can not appeal for intervention from the high authorities because they fear the Headmaster.

The main purpose of this letter therefore, is to expose this problem to the Member of Parliament for this District, the Local leaders of the district, Ministry of Education, Ministry of Finance, the IGG and lastly to the president to aver and cause a probe into this conundrum situation of the teachers and come out with a remedy.

December is a feastive season,that every body now is planning what to buy and eat during this season. These teachers are tight liped because they are not sure whether they will have got the money in the remaining two weeks to Xmas.

I will be most grateful, if this message reaches the targeted authorities who are expected to look into the matter and cause a smile to our teachers at KABASCO.

Concerned Parent/Relative

Muwanda Charles