By Lawel Muhwezi
It is 7:00pm July 14, 2022. Despite the onset of darkness, hundreds of students are moving on all university roads, chanting their candidates’ names. On the road from Livingstone Hall to Mitchell Hall alone, about 10 bands draped in different colours of different political parties, are singing all tribes of names and sounds. Kadodi (the Gishu traditional dance) is the most dominant.
Suddenly, there is gloom. News is circulating that at Northcote, a student has been stabbed. Minutes later, it is confirmed that Betungura Bewatte, a Uganda Christian University student, has succumbed to the stabbing. Betungura had studied at Mbarara High School with Tukamushaba Justus, the Forum for Democratic Change party candidate in the Students’ Guild presidential race. He had joined the campaign trail to support his friend.
His death is an unprecedented disaster. The Student Guild election campaigns at Makerere had always been peaceful. The final campaign day was always like a mega festival with students giving a final push of support for their candidates. Even students (like Betungura) from other universities, most of whom were close associates of candidates, youths, and politicians, from political parties all joined the campaign trails.
But on this day, all students are engulfed by a mixture of shock and fear. The public is outraged and the incident is immediately politicised.
As different camps blame each other for the incident, police swing into action arresting even those that helped take Betungura to hospital. The nation is looking to the University Management for answers.
At about 11:00pm, four hours after news of Betungura’s death, the University Council chairperson, Lorna Magara, releases a letter with three directives. The ongoing election is suspended indefinitely; the Students’ Guild is also suspended with immediate effect (this includes the Guild caretaker government and the Students Common Room (leadership of residential halls); and lastly, Management will investigate the cases of violence in the electoral campus and report to the council for appropriate action.
The writing is on the wall: the university management is going to teach students a lesson.
Alionzi Lawrence alias Dangote, the National Unity Platform (NUP) candidate, was poised to win the election (he eventually becomes Guild President after the resumption of the electoral exercise). A sensational campaign song composed by his team had taken social media by storm. What did the death of Betungura Bewatte mean in terms of freedoms at the University? “Everything, everything changed,” Alionzi responded in his quintessential Lugbara accent when I asked him early this year as I did interviews for this story.
Prof Jude Sempebwa, the General Secretary of Makerere University Academic Staff Association (MUASA), would later tell me the same thing.
Following Ms Lorna Magara’s letter, student representatives were kicked out of the University Council and removed from the caretaker government. The caretaker government was the temporary student leadership that existed during election time.
On July 29, 2022, two weeks after the University Council suspended the Guild, the students decided to form a select committee to push for the restoration of the Students’ Guild. The first meeting was held on Google Meet. This is where the concerned students chose the select committee representatives. The meeting was held on a Friday. The following Monday, August 1, 2022, Namwoza Sulaiman, a third-year student of Medicine and Surgery and Speaker of Lumumba Hall who convened that meeting, was suspended. “It is alleged that you made resolutions tantamounting to misinforming fellow students as well as directing the University Council to reinstate the student Guild, senior common room, and all student leadership structures,” reads part of the suspension letter he received from Vice Chancellor.
Kabulwa Muzafalu, a student of Journalism and the host of ‘Out Of The Box’ X Space was also threatened severally by the University Management for hosting controversial discussions about the university. He received messages and phone calls from senior officials including from the Vice Chancellor’s office warning him against conducting certain discussions or hosting certain critical voices on his X Space. These senior officials even contacted his lecturers to further exert pressure. But his lecturers defended him saying hosting controversial discussions was a central part of the journalism they were teaching him.
After the suspension of Sula, as he was commonly known, I took over the leadership of the select committee. I had been its spokesperson. Along with Luyomba Kelvin, the General Secretary to the committee, and other concerned students, we decided to come up with more creative but less risky ways to voice the students’ concerns.
We organised prayers at the university’s Freedom Square, and invited heads of the Anglican, Catholic and Islamic faiths at the university to lead the prayers. The prayers were fairly attended by students. The Reverends and the Iman did not attend. The following day, the warden of Mitchell Hall, where I was residing, called me to his office.
He seemed to have grown fond of me as one of the disciplined but influential student leaders. Our interactions were always warm. But on this occasion, I saw a different man—he looked worried and had no time for the usual pleasantries. Instead, immediately I entered, he pulled out a letter from the drawer of his desk. It was a warning letter – the last warning! There had been a few warnings before over student organizing related activities. But this time, I was being warned for organising prayers!
The famous Freedom Square was no longer free. Even before the incident of the student’s death, three Guild Presidential candidates had been struck out of the Guild Presidential race for holding what was termed an illegal assembly at Freedom Square.
The Square was even fenced off. Students had to write to the office of the Deputy Vice Chancellor of Finance and Administration DVC F&A to access it. The three candidates had been punished for not following this procedure.
One of the victims, Mwesigwa Mugambya Calvin was a tall, notable medical student, who enjoyed massive support. His efforts to petition the Vice Chancellor and the University Council came to naught. He finally gave up and decided to back Alionzi, who had at the time stood for the post of Nsibirwa Hall chairman.
Aftermath of Bewatte’s death, the university did not only stop at the three directives. The university established the Student Constitutional Committee to come up with a new students’ Guild constitution. This new constitution would address students’ issues. The students opposed this move. They argued that a new Guild leadership ought to have been voted into power and charged with reviewing the constitution and then amendments could be made by a leadership with a legitimate and popular mandate.
But the University Council went on with this committee. The committee was formed by law students, largely detached from the mainstream student leadership, who seemed excited about the idea of making a constitution, and whose other claim to this role were familial ties and connections to members of the university top management.
For instance, the chair of that committee was a son to Dr Kiggundu Muhammad, former university Public Relations Officer under Prof. Nawangwe. The young man had been a close friend. He had even called to consult me as to whether he should join the committee after administrators had called him and asked him to join. I discouraged him from standing against the students to extend the interests of the administration. I also told him that despite our friendship, I would lead the effort to oppose him and the entire scheme.
A few days after our conversation, he went ahead and took up the position. He is now an aide to Prof. Sarah Ssali, a member of the University Council, representing the Senate. Other members of that committee have since been awarded jobs in different university offices or placements for graduate studies for a job well done.
The committee came up with new changes, which included banning political parties at the university campus, putting the Dean of Students at the centre of organising the student elections, thereby taking power from the students, banning first-year students from standing for any Guild leadership positions, among others.
The state of political rights and the capacity of students to express themselves at the university was never the same again.
On June 23, 2022, a week after the death incident, Makerere University held the annual Frank Kalimuzo memorial lecture in celebration of the former Vice Chancellor’s contribution and sacrifice towards academia in Uganda.
Dr Kalimuzo had been the first indigenous Vice Chancellor of Makerere University appointed by President Apollo Milton Obote. Shortly, after his appointment, Idd Amin overthrew Obote in January 1971. Amin’s leadership would be characterised by abductions and extra-judicial killings.
In 1972, Kalimuzo would be picked up by security personnel never to be seen alive again. Other academics including Mahmood Mamdani, Robert Serumaga, George Kanyeihamba, and Dan Nabudele, would escape into exile. Some joined political groupings that later kicked Amin out of office. The Obote II government provided a short sigh of relief but later relapsed.
The 1986 capture of power by the National Resistance Army under Yoweri Museveni promised a new dawn. For academics, it was a time to flourish. This culminated in the hosting of a continental conference on academic freedoms in 1990 that resulted into the Kampala Declaration.
The Cold War had ended thereby marking a new epoch in the trajectory of African states. As decolonisation had spread through much of the continent, the struggle against apartheid was underway. The likes of Mamadou Diouf, Mahmood Mamdani, Arthur Mafeje, and other African intellectuals wrote about this new trajectory in their works such as the Academic Freedom in Africa that emerged from the declaration. In this sense, Uganda was hoisted as the centre of intellectual freedom on the continent.
The process that sought to establish a new national consensus was initiated. Consultations on the aggregate aspirations of the citizens were in high gear. In 1995, a new constitution was promulgated. While academic freedoms were not exclusively defined, they were provided for in the broader provisions like Article 29 on the right of expression and Article 30 on the right to education.
But shortly things started changing.
End of Part I
No Comments yet!