The Experience and Recollections from the Faculties, Schools, Institutes and Centres

8 The Experience and Recollections from the Faculties, Schools, Institutes and Centres Makerere’s Institute of Economics: New Programmes and a Contested Divorce The Harare-based African Capacity Building Foundation (ACBF), had been sponsoring a Masters degree in Economics, which taught African Economics at postgraduate level to assist African governments improve economic policy management for a number of years. McGill University in Montreal, Canada was running the programme for the English speaking African countries on behalf of the ACBF. However, after training a number of African economists at the university for some time, the ACBF was convinced that it made sense to transfer the training to Africa. McGill was not only expensive, it had another disadvantage: students studied in an alien environment, divorced from the realities of African economic problems. This necessitated a search for suitable universities in Anglophone Africa which had the capacity to host the programme. Acting on behalf of the ACBF, McGill University undertook a survey of universities in Anglophone Africa and identified two promising ones which met most of the conditions on ACBF’s checklist for hosting and servicing a regional programme of that kind. Earlier in 1996, Dr Apollinaire Ndorukwigira of the ACBF had visited Makerere to explore the possibility of Makerere participating in the new Economic Policy Management programme. On this particular visit, he said he was not making any commitments because McGill University was yet to undertake a detailed survey of a number of universities in Africa and, based on the findings, McGill University would advise the ACBF on the two most suitable universities which would host the programme. His was just an exploratory visit. His visit was followed with 228 Managing and Transforming an African University that of Dr Jacques Katuala in 1997. At the time, ACBF had begun to support the Economic Policy Research Centre which was Jacques Katuala’s main interest. Then in 1998, a delegation from McGill University, led by Professor Jan Jorgensen of McGill Business School, visited Makarere. After explaining the purpose of their visit and without promising anything, Professor Jorgensen requested to see the Head of the Department of Economics and the Dean of the Faculty of Commerce. The McGill delegation was interested in gathering as much data as possible on Makerere to be used in the evaluation of the university’s strength and weakness during the selection process. Besides Makerere, they were due to visit several other universities in Africa, because as Professor Jorgensen pointed out, the selection of the two universities that would eventually host the programme on behalf of the ACBF was through a competitive process. At that time, they were just conducting the evaluation, and had no idea which universities would be selected. We had to wait until they had visited all the universities on their list. After the preliminaries, I decided to invite Dr John Ddumba Sentamu who was then the Head of the Department of Economics and Waswa Balunywa, Dean of Commerce, to meet the delegation from Canada for more technical discussions. A few days later, the delegation left. Although I wished Makerere would be one of the two universities McGill would select to host the programme in Africa, I was not sure we were ready to run a continental programme. At the time, the Department of Economics and the Faculty of Commerce were housed on cramped premises. The Faculty of Commerce just had about one member of staff, who had a PhD from Eastern Europe. Frankly, I did not think Makerere stood a chance at all. Having visited it a few years before, I was aware that McGill was an extremely well-endowed university in Canada and, by comparison, I saw Makerere as one of the poorly resourced African universities in terms of human resources and infrastructure and therefore, in my opinion, a bit further down the McGill scale. Certainly, the evaluators would be looking for an African university with standards comparable to those at McGill University. I was convinced that such endowed universities in sub-Saharan Africa could only be found in South Africa. However, I decided to leave it at that and wait for the outcome. It was now a question of “wait and see”. McGill and the ACBF took time to announce the outcome of the evaluation exercise and the final two universities were selected. Surprisingly, after a tough selection process, Makerere University and the University of Ghana at Legon were the two which the evaluators had selected to host the MAEPM for English-speaking Africa. The University of Yaoundé in Cameroon and the University of Abidjan, Cocody in Ivory Coast had been chosen to host the programme for Francophone Africa, as was previously offered at CERDI, University of Clemont Farrand in France. Although the news was worth celebrating, I was still curious to know how we had managed to beat off the competition in spite of the problems. Then I The Experience and Recollections from the Faculties, Schools, Institutes and Centres 229 remembered the old African adage: “the gods help those who help themselves”. Since the fall of Idi Amin, Makerere had been busy bootstrapping itself out of its problems and with a reasonable degree of success. Indeed, we learnt that Makerere won the selection bid, because the Canadian team had discovered that it was one of the few universities in Africa outside South Africa which was implementing serious internal reforms. That had impressed the evaluators and helped to tip the balance in Makerere’s favour. I was told that many universities the Canadian delegation had visited were talking about reforms, but with nothing concrete translated into action. Dr Apollinaire Ndorukwigira of the ACBF, who had also visited a few years earlier and was in charge of institutional evaluation, told me that Makerere was selected not because it had superb facilities, but because of its innovativeness and clear vision. After going through all the procedures as laid down by Senate and Council, the Department of Economics launched the programme in 1998. Besides the traditional MA by thesis, the MAEPM was the second taught Masters degree in the department and had to be run as a joint programme with the Faculty of Commerce, which later became Makerere University Business School. The Department of Economics would teach all the Economics courses, while the Faculty of Commerce would handle the Management modules. A few months later, I was invited to Harare to sign the necessary protocols with the Executive Secretary of the ACBF after which we would formally launch the new programme. The first time I was invited, I could not go. So, I asked Professor Luboobi and Dr John Ddumba Sentamu to stand in for me. On that occasion, the ceremony was cancelled at the last moment. The next time when the ACBF was ready to sign the protocols, I flew to Harare with John Ddumba Sentamu. The Executive Secretary, Dr Soumana Sako, signed on behalf of the ACBF and I signed on behalf of Makerere University. As these developments were taking place, the Department of Economics, then one of the largest departments in the Faculty of Social Sciences, requested Senate and University Council to upgrade it to an autonomous Institute of Economics. As expected, there was uproar in the faculty; but after protracted discussions and several meetings, the faculty Board of Social Sciences agreed to grant the department the autonomy and let go. This in effect meant that the Department of Economics was breaking away from Social Sciences. The University Senate had no difficulty endorsing the proposal from the Social Sciences Department. The University Council approved the transformation of the department into an autonomous Institute of Economics in the 2000/2001 academic year, starting with three departments: Economic Theory and Analysis; Development Economics; Applied Economics (and an Economic Research Bureau). Dr John Ddumba Ssentamu had the honour of being the institute’s pioneer Director. Unfortunately, the new institute had no home of its own. As a department, it 230 Managing and Transforming an African University occupied a lot of space in the old Social Sciences building and had a few offices in the new Community Based Rehabilitation (CBR) building. Now that it was an autonomous unit, the Faculty of Social Science wanted the institute to vacate all the space of the defunct Department of Economics in the Social Sciences buildings. The institute counter-argued that all assets in the faculty were the property of all departments and if the new Institute of Economics had to vacate the buildings, the Faculty of Social Sciences was under obligation to compensate it for the lost space. The Dean of Social Sciences, Dr Joy Kwesiga felt the issue had gone beyond her and decided to refer it to me. Right from the beginning, I knew I was handling a hot potato I was least prepared for. In an attempt to douse the tempers and find an amicable solution, or at least a reasonable compromise, I held several meetings with all parties involved and at one point, I had reason to believe we had resolved the problem. I was disappointed when I continued to receive complaints of non-compliance with the agreed position. The compromise we had struck required the Institute of Economics to surrender some offices that belonged to the defunct Department of Economics in exchange for others on the different floors of the two Social Sciences buildings. There was also a growing but understandable feeling amongst members of staff that their faculty was shrinking in size and being marginalised. Over the years, it had lost the Law Department – the forerunner to the present Faculty of Law; the Department of Commerce, which became the Faculty of Commerce and later the Business School; and now one of its largest departments was also breaking away.

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