Reforms in the higher education sector in Africa have stimulated enormous scholarly interest among researchers of diverse regional and disciplinary backgrounds. While much of the interest has produced useful studies on the effects of privatisation on relevance, equity and access, some studies have simply been celebratory. Particularly worrying have been those findings that dubiously corresponded to the ideological predisposition of the sponsoring institution.
Conceptually, there are three generations of literature that more or less lie in-between the desire for dispassionate interpretation and those others that seek to ideologically conform. The first are World Bank (and similarly oriented institutions) studies. The Bank is of special interest in this regard since it has been a key actor on the higher education scene in Africa owing to its fiscal influence. The findings in studies it sponsors tend more or less to correspond to the policy justification it pronounced for education reforms in Africa in the early 1980s and the reversals it has made since then.[1] The Bank framed and treated education like any other investment that was subject to the market logic. This resulted in the emphasis on basic at the expense of higher education.
Second are studies of a more critical nature sponsored mostly by a number of major foundations. These studies critique the direction of education reforms, identify the main shortcoming in the process and seek to provide resources aimed at revitalizing the sector. Though these studies represent the first initiatives at understanding the effects of the reform process, they only mildly question the market logic underpinning these reforms and as such end up implicitly celebrating the idea that they ought to question.
The third are a set of recent studies designed and driven by the research interests of independent individuals or institutions. Though these studies are also informed by the ideological predispositions of the authors and institutions that they are associated with, they are based on extensive and thorough empirical work and deal with a comparatively longer historical time frame. These strengths, combined with the fact that they are also informed by a sound methodological approach, reveal them as more rigorous and ‘radical’ than the first two sets of literature.
Mahmood Mamdani’s study titled Scholars at the Marketplace belongs to the third category of literature. The study has several advantages; the first is associated with the author and the other revolves around the choice of topic. As a Ugandan and former professor at Makerere, Mamdani has unmatched understanding of the dynamics of reforms at the university. This combines very well with the fact that Mamdani has wide experience of the African education scene having researched and taught at various universities in Africa and served as president of the premier social science organization in Africa, CODESRIA.
The author’s choice of Makerere is perfect. Makerere has been at the centre of the reform process since 1992. It is a pioneer of privately sponsored student programmes in the East African region and has been lauded severally by the Bank as a leading institution where reform is concerned.[2] It is the oldest university in the region and among the first to seriously embrace the idea of reforms floated by the Bank. With such a head start, Makerere has obviously attracted enormous attention. But the attention has, until recently, largely been laudatory. Most analyses have paid lip-service attention to the critical issues of what impact such reforms have had on the historic role of the university in both human manpower development and national service and on issues of quality, relevance and access.
Mamdani addresses these two questions. He shows that the reform process in Makerere was driven by the lecturers under a policy framework defined by the Bank. The context is important: at the behest of the Bank, Uganda government simply abdicated from its responsibility of financing university education. It allocated funds, but these were normally lower than what the university requested; when it dispensed the allocation, this was significantly lower than what was promised. As such, the university began to explore alternative avenues of funding its operations. It shifted its focus on raising money from fee-paying students who did not qualify for public sponsorship. In other words, privatisation grew as “a survival strategy than a first preference” (p. 3). The more fee paying students the university attracted, the less funding it received from the state. Eventually the government excused itself from funding higher education while the university began to see privatization as a source of additional funds. At the time, “the overriding view was both short term and narrowly financial, that privatization would lead to a financial gain without a cost” to the university (p 29).
Reform started as a move towards simple privatization, but was soon overridden by commercialization and vocationalisation. Though the university administration preferred privatisation, the combined force of academic staff and students at Makerere put their weight around a form of privatisation that entailed a profit-maximisation and income-maximisation strategy (pp. 30-31). This involved getting commercial units to become profit-making while professional schools would become fee-earning. To induce them into achieving these objectives, financial and administrative decentralisation were allowed in turn so that as fee-earning units attracted more students, they also retained most of the income generated and proceeded to manage the programmes independent of the central administration.
Mamdani shows that this process took place in a piece meal fashion through a process of trial and error. The result was that “the structure was in place for gradual dismantling of the public university and its step-by-step replacement by a privatised university.” In Mamdani’s apt words, the university “system of decision-making” was so “comprehensively decentralised that no one, neither the centre nor any of the constitutive units, any longer had a comprehensive idea of the “reforms” in the university.” The result, he adds, was that each “faculty saw the university from only its own vantage point. Eventually, no one really knew what the elephant looked like. Meanwhile, the elephant was being transformed from a public to a private beast” (p. 32).
The initial idea of privatisation rested on the assumption of admitting private students to external programmes and slowly divest into evening and later into day programmes. It was also assumed that such students would be admitted into professional faculties thereby leaving the heart of the university academic programmes in the Arts, Social Sciences and Science untouched. Such a scenario, it was assumed, would leave the core university function of intellectual quality and national service intact. But by 1996, this assumption had been overturned as Faculty of Arts became the hub of the market-driven courses admitting more private students than most professional and technical faculties for both evening and day programmes. From then onwards, not only were the academic programmes at the heart of the academy privatised and commercialised, the Faculty of Arts led the way to vocationalisation as opposed to professionalisation. Vocationalisation dealt a major blow to the quality of education while decentralisation ensured the remedial steps would be almost impossible to effect.
The results of this process are discussed in chapter two to four of the study. The chapter review how reforms at Makerere led to the turf wars, commercialisation and decentralisation. The turf war pitted faculty against faculty, faculty against central administration, at times, leading some units to secede. Some departments conflicted with others especially when lecturers were poached to teach in other programmes. So insidious was the market ethic that had penetrated Makerere that many of the “staff were no longer willing to do anything that was not directly paid for” (p.70). Furthermore, the increasing numbers of students had serious negative impact on quality of education. For one, the university did not hire more teaching staff in response to expanding student numbers thereby leaving teaching to an overworked staff that, in turn, did a poor job or left teaching to part-time lecturers whose qualifications were dubious at best (pp.111-119). Also, there was a problem of lack of lecture space as the university infrastructure was hardly expanded to meet increasing numbers. A member of one investigating committee referred to the teaching facilities in Makerere as slums (p. 134; see also pp. 136-142). The library facilities were in turn misused as the vocational students used it “simply as reading space” and not as “a source of reading and research material” (p. 145). Worse, the central administration did not adjust to the reality that the expanded student population, which attended courses through evening programmes, needed administrative services precisely at the time when university offices closed (p. 160). Then, there was the transgression of disciplinary boundaries as departments and faculties ‘innovated’ by creating interdisciplinary programmes that were hardly anchored in any disciplinary competence and that simply fuelled the poaching of staff between departments all on the pretext of generating income. “The cumulative outcome of these developments,” Mamdani concludes, was “the erosion of the public university called Makerere and the dramatic growth, at first alongside it but increasingly in its place, of a private university with the same name but with inter-disciplinary vocational programmes, fee-paying students, a predominantly part-time teaching staff and a permanent administrative staff hired as coordinators (p. 119).
Scholars in the Marketplace makes for interesting reading. First, it explodes the myth that private-sponsored students were a money making venture. On the contrary, Mamdani shows that “the university’s income still came mainly from government” (p. 233). Second, it shows that academic standards have not only fallen well below quality, this has come at a cost to the research base that was at the core of the university mission. Instead, there is vocationalisation of the academic curriculum which, Mamdani recommends, ought to be separated “from the academic university, and the non-research-based from research-based education” (p. 237). Finally, he argues that Makerere needs to be re-think the nature of decentralisation in favour of separating the financial from administrative and academic (p. 238). This would deal with the unjustified resistance that staff mounted against well-intentioned reforms initiated by the central administration.
This is a fine study. Though one misses the Mamdani of Citizen and Subject and When Victims Become Killers, in Scholars in the Marketplace, the narrative approach more than compensates for the analytical hesitancy. Clearly, it was necessary that the data that Mamdani marshalled had to be presented in this format. Yet still, the concluding chapter could have been more rigorous in deploying the authors’ analytical skills to provide a more generalised, even comparative, treatment of higher education reforms in Africa. After all, Mamdani has been at the leadership apex of the African social science community and there are now enough studies for such comparisons and generalisations to be made. Mamdani’s study of Makerere is microcosmic in many ways and perhaps the author has thrown a long overdue challenge to all of us to join in the discussion. Certainly, this is a useful intervention that ought to be replicated for Africa, if not for the East African region. The results can only be better.
Godwin R. Murunga, Ph.D. Northwestern Universwity,
Department of History, Archaeology and Political Studies,
Kenyatta University, Nairobi, Kenya
