Makerere should negotiate with Parents, Guardians to reduce fees strikes

By Davies Rwabu

This week has been horrendous. There has been student unrest at Makerere and Kyambogo Universities respectively. For Makerere, it marks another vehemently ugly tale that has come to keep haunting the University each time important steps are made in her advancement as a premier institution in the country and in the region.

The same can be said of Kyambogo up on its feet but dogged by severe student unrest. Makerere is taken aback several strides each time there is progress as far as ranking by the Webometrics and World University Rankings that places Makerere at 4th in Africa by 30th September 2015 release. These parameters make less sense with continuous unrest. As things stand, I draw to the conclusion that students’ leadership is a bad negotiator.

Let parents and guardians negotiate with the university about payment terms and options. Let us have a forum that brings together parents/guardians to deal with the university. Currently, there is a vacuum for parent involvement.

The bulk stops at sending the student to university and waiting for the graduation day. This forum can also be enlarged in its mandate to enable the university authorities share their predicament with the parents/guardians who tirelessly toil to keep the university afloat through the private scheme.

This association can also help parents suggest how they can collectively contribute the university financing since they will be made fully aware of the expenditure budget as a right. After all, he who pays the piper calls the tune.

Student leadership is inconsequential to current trends of management of a volatile and often misguided student population by schemers that want to take on the next guild leadership of the institution. The strike has always provided an opportunity to many would be guild seeking office bearers with the perfect opportunity to show case their ability to mobilize.

Unfortunately, the skills are misplaced – coalescing and galvanizing the student population to knock off an unpopular policy – the kind of scheme that has infiltrated our nation politics to the extent that a candidate abducts himself to cause panic in the electorate and get popular on return from a self imposed and orchestrated abduction.

The guild politics of the 1980s and 1990s and less in the early 2000s are gone. We have guild politics in the doldrums; a disastrous strike leader or severally imprisoned individual is likely to be the victor. The politics of ideas as a reflection of national politics was long buried.

Student engagement is at its lowest even amongst the student leadership. Gone are the days when guild cabinets had an embodiment of authority and valor. It is now dominated by inept, less focused and fairly young and unwittingly self ambitious individuals with a larger sense of false entitlement and worse where there is none. Yet it is this leadership that should be the answer to negotiated protracted struggles that would benefit the students’ community. Champion a students’ environment that assures the rest of academic excellence and creates an esteemed environment for everyone to enjoy and be proud of.

Certainly, unfair policies must be debated and resisted. But where does one explain a scenario where one is granted leave to enjoy a service from the university for 6 weeks and there after revolts on payment with hostility.

An extension is granted for close to 4 weeks but the person wakes up one morning to demand a total withdrawal of the policy altogether. Guild leadership has not been respected on this and they lack the steel and oil to rub into the rest of the students. These are bad negotiators. They should not get to the negotiating table again. The time is now to shift approach. Let’s now engage parents/guardians.

Yes, parents, like is the case with Parents and Teachers Associations in secondary school and primary school where the fees are relatively higher than for some causes at the university. They will not only understand but will also demand commensurate service to the needs of their children. They will seek accountability and transparency.  But over and above they have the purse to all public university financial woes since the university rely on private scheme. They can use their mandate to increase fees as well.

If some of these changes do not happen, it will leave university management with the only option of insisting that 100% university dues must be paid by the end of 6th week and occasionally we will keep degenerating to running battles of students with police including vandals, ransacking canteens and shops and innocent students suffering the brunt of the strike and ultimately no one will believe Makerere is a premier institution in the region.

Davies Rwabu is a Communication Specialist and Part-Time Lecturer at Makerere University.