{UAH} Allan/Pojim/WBK: Mamdanism and the Makerere crisis
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Mamdanism and the Makerere crisis
Written by MOSES KHISA
To many outsiders, the problem is narrowly seen as a clash between Mamdani and the eccentric Dr Stella Nyanzi, a research fellow. Years of mutual hostility reached a crescendo Monday morning when Nyanzi stripped to protest what she believes is Mamdani's exercise of raw power.
This was triggered by Mamdani's insistence to force Nyanzi out of her office for refusing to teach courses on the institute's PhD programme. Mamdani pressed on with the eviction in flagrant disregard of advice from the university's deputy vice chancellor for finance and administration.
In the wake of Nyanzi's Monday act, the predictable happened: emotionally-charged arguments, condemning her and praising Mamdani, lambasting Mamdani while praising Nyanzi for courageously standing up against patriarchal repression. In the charged debates, getting to grips with the full picture of the crisis is obstructed. The problem is bigger than Nyanzi refusing to teach and Mamdani forcing her out of office.
Whichever way the stand-off ends, Mamdani's image has been deeply dented. With a knack for magnifying even small disagreements into bigger fights, Mamdani has issued threats to the university: discipline Nyanzi and take her away from MISR or else he will quit Makerere.
Apparently, without him, the PhD program will crumble. This sounds like veiled blackmail, but it is not. The PhD program, started in 2012, is built around Mamdani without much institutional anchorage.
It was conceived by him and only he knows how to implement it, at least in the short run. Now, this is the problem of Mamdanism. An integral part of this problem is the disdain for other people and disregard of work done by those Mamdani found at Makerere when he returned in 2010.
At the start of the PhD programme in 2012, Mamdani made a series of misleading assertions, which I responded to in these pages and The Independent magazine. Some were half-truths, others were outright false.
First, he claimed that Makerere was not a research university because there was no research work coming out. This is patently false. One can rightly question the quality and bemoan the quantity of research output by our premier university, but there is no merit in claiming that there was no research going on at Makerere. This dismissive tone is what Mamdani started with as MISR director.
Second, in a rather disingenuous attempt to justify the new PhD programme he was implementing, Mamdani reasoned that a research university must 'grow its timber,' meaning it must train its own researchers. And that the best way to do so is to have PhD programmes that include a substantial coursework component. This is only partly true.
PhD training is one of the most important ways to orient scholars into the onerous task of knowledge production. But it's no guarantee. And a coursework PhD programme cannot be looked at as the magic bullet. You can locally train PhDs but if the work environment is unconducive and the social milieu does not comport with the search for knowledge and pursuit of ideas, not much can be achieved.
The bit of this second argument that is utterly misleading is the claim that research universities 'grow their own timber'. To the contrary, reputable universities pride themselves not in inbreeding but in being able to competitively attract the best scholars with rich CVs.
One can argue that a financially-constrained university like Makerere cannot attract the best scholars trained elsewhere; so, it needs to train its own researchers. But this is not the same as saying that a research university must train its own.
Also, there is no guarantee that locally-trained researchers will be committed to the cause of research in a tough economic environment of striving to earn a living and in the absence of crucial research resources, including funding.
When he was hired, Mamdani announced that he was going to sweep aside the consultancy work the institute was doing, and reorient it back to genuine research. He had a vision.
The vision was the interdisciplinary PhD in social sciences, the ultimate solution to doing research and ditching consultancy. You either agreed with this vision or you had to quit. All the researchers he found at MISR left, one-by-one. Those who came in with him or after have all since left, except the iconoclastic Nyanzi.
But the starting point for anyone seeking to turn people away from the consultancy culture is to carefully understand why they are drawn there. The crisis at Makerere is institutional and structural. It cannot be cured by a 'magic-bullet' PhD programme.
Instead of attempting to persuasively chart a new agenda for the institute, Mamdani started his tenure as MISR director with an adversarial attitude and a dismissive rhetoric. Thus, the PhD programme has largely been a one-man vision, assisted by foreign researchers whose stay inevitably ends up being untenable due to a combination of institutional rigidities and the miserly way Mamdani treats his colleagues.
The author teaches political science at Northwestern University/Evanston, Chicago-USA.
Democracy is two Wolves and a Lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed Lamb disputing the results.
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