Makerere's Chancellors and Their Times (1970 – 2004)

2 Makerere’s Chancellors and their Times (1970 – 2004) Under the British system, every public university has a titular head called the Chancellor who is largely a ceremonial official without executive powers. Most university charters prescribe in some detail who can be Chancellor, how one is appointed to the office, as well as the duties and functions of a Chancellor. In principle, any person of good standing in society could be appointed Chancellor. One of the important functions of a Chancellor is to preside over the university’s graduation ceremony and confer degrees and other academic awards of the university. The Chancellor may also be called upon to preside over other ceremonial functions of the university. Another role a Chancellor plays is to appoint the Vice Chancellor who is the executive head of the university. In the system commonly used in the North America, Japan and elsewhere, the President of the university is the equivalent of the Vice Chancellor. The Francophone system uses the title of Rector, meaning ruler in Latin. There are other minor roles a Chancellor carries out. Under the defunct University of East Africa, the late “Mwalimu” Julius Kambarage Nyerere was its first and last Chancellor until the position was dissolved in 1970. Milton Obote, who was then President of Uganda became the “Visitor” to Makerere University College. This position empowered him to direct a visitation to inquire into the affairs of the college. As far as Makerere College was concerned, this was the only role assigned to the Head of State of Uganda by the charter that set up the University of East Africa. Apollo Milton Obote, the First Chancellor of Makerere University – First Term When Makerere University College became the national University of Uganda in 1970, a precedence was set. A ruling President of Uganda was its automatic 22 Managing and Transforming an African University Chancellor and as we have seen, the practice was enshrined in the Makerere University, Kampala Act of 1970. The strong argument advanced in support of this practice was that with the Head of State, being the Head of Government as well as Chancellor, the university stood to receive sympathetic attention when it came to the allocation of resources. To a certain extent, this argument made sense because at the time, society and government viewed the university as a special institution that required some sort of preferential treatment from the State, which only the Head of State could confer. But many academics were skeptical about that simplistic argument, which they believed was flawed right from the beginning and had serious consequences for the future of Makerere. They were fearful of the excessive control of the university by the state and its functionaries. They saw this as the beginning of direct political interference in the affairs of the university and the erosion of the long cherished academic freedom. Perhaps, the events that followed in the latter years vindicated them. Milton Obote, the architect of the 1970 Act, was installed as the first Chancellor on October 8, 1970. Had Obote not abrogated the 1962 national Constitution, it is probable that Sir Edward Muteesa who, until the 1966 Buganda crisis was the non-executive President of Uganda, would have been the first Chancellor. Up till then, Milton Obote was Prime Minister and not the Head of State. Obote replaced Muteesa as President with full executive powers in 1966, a status which was later enshrined in the Republican Constitution of 1967. Milton Obote was no stranger to Makerere. He had been, though briefly, a student there in the latter part of the1940s. In 1949, he left the college, as we shall see later, for unclear personal reasons before completing the two-year diploma. Obote did not continue with his studies, and therefore, never graduated. Instead, he went to Kenya to look for employment. It is believed that his political thoughts were shaped and moulded in Kenya when he joined the Trade Union movement there. One is tempted to speculate that when Milton Obote became Chancellor of Makerere University, he must have had some lingering resentment of the institution he had unceremoniously left almost 30 years earlier. Indeed, in his inaugural speech as Chancellor, he lamented the cold reception he had received when he visited the college in the 1950s, as one of the activists agitating for Uganda’s independence. Apparently, the college’s intellectual community had no time for his small talk, moreover as he was a dropout. He also warned in the same speech that although for the time being Makerere was the only university in Uganda, it would not take the Government long to establish other public universities. However, it took almost 20 years for his prediction to be realised, with the opening of Mbarara University of Science and Technology, the second public university in the country, in 1988. Obote’s chancellorship hardly lasted a year. It abruptly ended with the military coup d’état of January 25, 1971. We can only imagine what Obote had in store for Makerere’s Chancellors and their Times (1970 – 2004) 23 Makerere, had he lasted longer as Chancellor. For an academic institution used to enjoying freedom of speech and independent thinking, the little some of us saw left much to be desired. The university was flooded with Akena Adoko’s General Service operatives, which included both staff and students. Political polarisation was slowly but surely taking root, as those who did not support the Ugandan Peoples’ Congress (UPC) were intimidated into silence. The politics of fear had pervaded the university. Organisations like the National Union of the Students of Uganda (NUSU) and the National Union of Youth Organisations (NUYO) had become UPC youth brigades on the campus. Some students were over-politicised to the extent that they had made it a habit to follow the President wherever he went. In late 1970, seven students were burnt beyond recognition when the small bus they were traveling in overturned and caught fire in the Kyalusowe swamp, some 10 kilometres from Masaka town, on the Kampala–Masaka Highway. They were returning from Kabale after attending Obote’s political rally there. Soon after his overthrow in 1971, many students who were his staunch supporters wept openly and bitterly, lamenting that their revolution, which was essentially the move to the left, had been raped. Every evening, some diehards would assemble in front of Northcote Hall and sing UPC praise songs, urging the world to condemn the coup d’état and castigate Idi Amin for overthrowing a legitimate Government. Perhaps they had conveniently forgotten that Obote was supposed to have called a general election in 1967, but did not, using the state of emergency he had declared in Buganda as an excuse for postponing the election. In fact, his extended stay in power up to 1971 was as illegitimate as Amin’s coup. Luckily for them, at the time, their utterances against Amin’s popular military regime went unnoticed, perhaps on the account that Idi Amin was still enjoying his political honeymoon and nothing appeared to threaten him then. Some of the final year students who were bitterly opposed to Idi Amin, like Masete Kuya, a student in the Faculty of Social Sciences, went into exile immediately after writing their last examination papers to join their mentor in Tanzania. Many came back as part of the combined Tanzania/Uganda invasion force, which overthrew Idi Amin in 1978. In spite of his real or perceived political shortcomings, one cannot fail to recognise Obote’s contribution to the infrastructural development of the university. Buildings such as the Mathematics block in the Faculty of Science, Africa Hall – the second female hall on the campus, Lumumba Hall, the West Road staff flats, the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine complex, and the Faculty of Technology, to mention a few, were all constructed in Obote’s time, before and after becoming the university’s first Chancellor. Given his apparent lackluster interest in the university affairs, we can sum up Obote’s relationship with Makerere as a love- hate one, as he himself used to tell the press. 24 Managing and Transforming an African University Idi Amin Dada – Makerere’s Second Chancellor General Idi Amin, who later promoted himself as Field Marshal, was installed as Makerere’s second Chancellor in March 1971. One thing he seems to have enjoyed as Chancellor was rubbing shoulders with the academic fraternity, and he relished the fact that he could appoint and dismiss a Vice Chancellor at will. But as he enjoyed the trappings of the office, one could detect in him a deep-seated hatred and mistrust for the educated, in particular the highly educated Makerere dons. The murder and disappearance of several prominent academics at the time is linked to this mistrust. As a result, it became too dangerous to be found in possession of a Makerere University identity card. Many members of staff nearly lost their lives at the hands of Amin’s security operatives because of this. As a precaution, Professor Lutwama, the then Vice Chancellor was prompted to issue a quiet warning to staff to be extra careful and not to overstay in their offices and laboratories after office hours. For Makerere, Amin’s chancellorship was a very disruptive one and this contributed to the erosion of the university’s prestige and reputation as a fine academic institution, not only in Africa but also in the whole world. The mass staff exodus almost paralysed the once vibrant institution. It was also during Amin’s time that salaries of the academic staff at Makerere as well as other categories of salaried staff in Government departments started losing purchasing power.

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