Bruce Kabasa, who heads the Makerere Appointments Board, has impacted on Uganda’s premier University since his days as a student in early 2000s. He started out as a student leader and even competed for guildship. After graduating, he became chairman Convocation which unites the alumni. This gave him membership to the governing council where he currently ranks among the most senior members with unrivalled influence. He also chairs the Appointments Board (AB), a position that used to be a preserve of older retired persons. It’s in the AB where Kabasa has made many enemies mostly the academic staff at Makerere. One of the reforms he insisted on as the head of the AB charged with hiring staff was to make the interviewing process, preceding recruitment, more rigorous. He came up with a policy that significantly changed the way academic staff are recruited at Makerere. In the past yes jobs used to be advertised but the best got to be recruited basing on the good qualifications manifested in their transcripts. He who had the best first class was assured of getting the job. All you did was to respond to an advert by submitting your qualifications and he who had the best first class degree took the job. “You would have many people applying but the one with first class was rated best and took the job. That happened whether one was from Makerere or not. That is how someone with a first class degree from say KIU, as long as it was a chartered University, would be given the job ahead of Makerere’s own graduates,” says an informed official. “If you had more than one person with first class, it then reduced to who had the best CGPA. This has since changed with Kabasa’s entry into the AB. It’s no longer enough to have a first class or a good master’s degree or a PhD. People have to be interviewed so that one’s intelligence and ability to deliver before a class of students is assessed beyond just having a first class degree. There are fears this rigorous process will in future be relied upon to determine one’s wish to be promoted to professorship and understandably people are very afraid. People naturally resent change even when this is how a highly rated 21st century University has to operate,” said one of the top officials we spoke to.
THE GENESIS;
This new system of recruitment began to apply with the early 2016 advert that Kabasa’s appointments board sent out. The advert announced existence of over 150 lecturer positions in the different Makerere Colleges. When he was still VC, Ddumba Sentamu came under endless attacks during Senate meetings as Principals and Deans always cried to him saying they had many vacant positions and there was need to replace lecturers who had died, retired and resigned from the University service for greener pastures. This is when the advert was designed to carry out University-wide recruitment. The University was looking for PhD-holding lecturers to do teaching, research and graduate student-supervision. The recruitment, has up to this day never been completed, a thing that has caused Kabasa to be misunderstood. Some disgruntled applicants, gripped with anxiety, have claimed being targeted for extortion by some AB members in return for favorable treatment during recruitment. However, knowledgeable officials say recruitment has delayed for a number of factors including previous strikes that caused the University to remain closed for an entire Semester sometime in 2016. Time was lost during that period. Then came the vacuum in the HR office before Ms Dorothy Senoga Zzake ceased to act for substantive HR Director Andrew Abunyangu to come in. The University management and Council resolved to halt the recruitment until the substantive HR came in. The recruitment of the DHR itself wasn’t without incident. Some went as far as petitioning the IGG citing foul play. Consequently a lot of time was lost and the recruitment of the 150 lecturers stalled. This created more anxiety and made Kabasa’s AB to be misunderstood like never before.
COLLEGES PAY THE PRICE;
In the end, Colleges whose HR and Establishment committees play a role in the interviewing process have suffered most. Abunyangu is understood to be about to release the list of successful applicants and this being Makerere, information has already leaked enabling some of the applicants to know their fate. At Prof Hissali’s COBAMS, for instance there is brewing revolt as some lecturers feel they aren’t going to be successful in getting recruited for the jobs they applied for. At Prof Kirumira’s CHUSS, similar chaos is impending as many unsuccessful applicants have already turned their guns on members of the College’s HR committee that conducted the interviews following parameters laid down in the HR Manual. The HR committee in each College comprises of the Principal, the School Deans and some technical persons who are hired to sit on the interview panel as consultants to guide on technical aspects. The HR Manual mandates the Principal to be the one to chair such interview meetings. The process is closely supervised by the HR Directorate in the main building currently headed by seasoned Abunyangu who was recruited from public service ministry. At Prof Masagazi’s CEES, this University-wide recruitment process has given opportunity for staff members to settle old scores. Some of the aggrieved applicants further capitalized on the situation by petitioning the IGG seeking to discredit the entire recruitment exercise. Claiming that it’s only three of the 7 applicants for the lecturer jobs in one of the Schools at CEES, a whistle blower rushed to the IGG citing irregularities. According to sources in the IG Inspectorate, the whistle blower claims that Florence Nakamanya, Irene Etomaru and a one Balojja are the only ones who have been recommended to Abunyangu for appointment. The whistle blower claims that the School Dean, who declared his conflict of interest and abstained from participating in their recruitment, is the one who favored the trio and ensured they got recruited because they are his supervisees. That the Dean supervised the trio’s PhD for which they graduated February this year. The irony for Makerere is that some of the people who applied work/teach in other Universities like KIU, KYU, KU and don’t currently teach at Makerere. They only did their PhDs at Makerere and it’s an ethical requirement contained even in the HR Manual that one’s former PhD supervisor can’t sit in the College HR interview panel when their former student is coming to be interviewed. That is how Prof Betty Ezati, who as a referee who recommended Dr. Nakamanya, had to excuse herself from the interview panel when it was her time to be interviewed.
EARLIER CLAIMS;
An earlier whistle blower had reported to the IGG that the CEES College interview exercise was sham because three applicants were fraudulently shortlisted even when they clearly didn’t qualify because they didn’t comply with the guidelines. There was a requirement that applications had to be hand written but the three CEES applicants had put in typed applications which is ground enough for them to have been disqualified. The IGG abandoned that inquiry after being notified that this requirement for hand written application was waived following a directive by Abunyangu urging the College to ignore because this was a small technicality. The other area causing Professors to gang up on Kabasa relates to the new education pedagogy that all dons will have to go through as part of their career progression. The AB has undertaken several bench marking trips in many countries abroad and Kabasa is determined to enforce the new system that has resulted into increased scrutiny around the promotion processes.
OLD SCORES;
At CEES, the resultant chaos has given chance to old scores to be settled. For instance there is a professor whose application for post-retirement contract wasn’t granted by Kabasa’s AB. The reason for this denial was that the professor had previously rendered himself inactive by refusing to supervise students and travelling to South Africa without proper authorization. The same professor now sees the opportunity to mess up things for colleagues still working at CEES. Besides the new Kabasa interview innovations, there are dons who aspired but failed to ascend the office of deanship or even Principal (at Mak this can be a very polarizing exercise) and now is payback time for them. For instance in 2014, the Academic Registrar Alfred Namoah disqualified some dons from competing for CEES deanship on grounds that they didn’t meet minimum qualifications. There was one Namoah, who serves as the returning officer for such elections, locked out for lacking the Senior Lecturer status which is the minimum qualification for one to stand for deanship. There are some who at CEES were disqualified on grounds of age (one must be below 56) and the wounds have never healed up to this day. The incumbents are allegedly using the ongoing Abunyangu-supervised recruitment to lock out lecturers that will frustrate their re-election in a few months’ time. There are also applicants that couldn’t go far in competing because their PhD’s resulted from dissertation’ submission as opposed to the course work and PhD teaching approach which tends to carry more points and weight in the recruitment exercise as provided for in the Mak recruitment policy. The policy also bars applicants with 2nd lower from being shortlisted and those who get obstructed by that requirement have also often rushed to the IGG accusing the recruitment committee members of extortion, nepotism, bribery-solicitation and favoritism. Some have been accused of favoring their girlfriends to get recruited into the University system. Truth is people will always have girlfriends and even boyfriends and what is critical in Administrative Law, which is applicable in such cases, is for that conflict of interest to be declared during the interview process so that fiancées don’t favor their future spouses. Some of the big people are alleged to have travelled to South Africa for a conference in 2015 from where they bonded and are using this recruitment to reciprocate those that treated them well while in the Mandela-land. For comments, call, text or whatsapp us on 0703164755.
