President Museveni’s visitation committee ordered for a headcount of students at Uganda’s oldest university, Makerere.
According to a circular from Alfred Masikye Namoah the University’s Academic Registrar, all students are required to present themselves for the headcount in their respective colleges at designated venues with their valid identity cards and admission letters for all continuing students.
The circular demands first year students to present their registration forms with an admission letter and their former secondary school identity cards or National Identity card.
It threatens to purge the non verified students from all university records and not consider them as Makerere University students.
And embattled Makerere Institute of Social Research (MISR), research fellow Dr Stella Nyanzi has her take on the matter.
She says the university with all its records and developed IT systems shouldn’t be failing to know the current number of students they have.
“What is the use of records and databases? What is the use of all the lists developed from pencil pushing tasks of admission, registration, daily attendance lists, exam lists, etc? How is it possible that all the university administrators responsible for students do not know the exact number of students in the university? Who does this uncertainty of student numbers serve? Who benefits from public ignorance about the total number of students? How does the university explain away this sloppiness?” a furious Nyanzi asked.
Dr Nyanzi also questions the eligibility of Makerere’s praised glory questioning why a university known for great statisticians can fail to calculate the number of students in the university.
“Makerere still has the audacity to boast about teaching Statistics, QE, Mathematics, IT, Management and Administration, yet the university gurus cannot agree about how many students they have.”
A lot still remains to be desired from this headcount especially for the log distance learning students and those on exchange programs among many other categories.
“There are students doing fieldwork in field sites away from campus, students on international exchange programs abroad, students attending conferences outside Kampala or across borders, etc. What will happen to all these students who will miss the headcount?” lamented Nyanzi
Dr Nyanzi questions the validity of this entire process which is a recommendation by Museveni’s visitation committee.
“Will this process of counting students solve the puzzle of numbers or in fact, isn’t it just going to generate another meaningless number competing against all the other meaningless numbers out there?”
Nyanzi is infamously remembered for staging a nude protest and painted MISR walls red on the morning of April 18th, 2016 after she was evicted from her office by the institute’s director Prof. Mahmood Mamdani.
