LONDON-UNITED KINGDOM/NEWSDAY:
President Yoweri Museveni has well and truly consolidated his status as the most controversy-prone leader in recent Ugandan history in terms of policy direction. More recently, he has been embroiled in attempts to tinker with property rights in the context of his views on mailo land (a type of freehold tenure mostly unique to the Kingdom of Buganda) tenure as well as the constitutional right to apply for bail. Before that, the whole COVID-19 pandemic crisis was completely mismanaged and it turned into the complete shambles that we all witnessed.
Now, he is wading into yet another controversial area – the creation of superficial differentials in secondary school teacher remuneration. True to tradition, he appears to be haplessly and helplessly limping from crisis to crisis without enlisting the benefit competent advice, despite the taxpayer footing billions in wages for the hordes of all sorts of presidential advisers at his disposal.
Addressing the gathering at Kololo Ceremonial Grounds on 13 October 2021 to mark the World Teachers’ Day, President Museveni announced that the government will raise the the pay for secondary Biology, Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics and ICT teachers in the first place, creating a polarising divide within the profession, yet with no proven advantages and benefits that the President can authoritatively cite for a country of Uganda’s stage of development where we are still grappling with illiteracy.
This debate is not new or indeed unique to Uganda – it has happened and is still raging even in more advanced economies where it has equally generated an awful lot of controversy. If President Museveni is aping those countries, he is completely ill-advised because those countries have before now attained a considerable and decent research and innovation base, which they are now trying to tweak to the needs of their society. Our base is still nascent and negligible and, like most policy initiatives undertaken by this regime, it will not work or even backfire on the regime.
German-born scientist Albert Einstein, widely considered to be one of the greatest (theoretical) physicists of all time said that “[t]he greatest scientists are artists as well”. It is now acknowledged that the interplay and interface between arts and sciences are at the centre of the modern economy. Without delving into too much technical details, Museveni’s education chiefs ought to have explained to the President the essence of pedagogy (the method and practice of teaching, especially as an academic subject or theoretical concept), is an art in and of itself, which would by logical extension be excluded from those subjects to benefit from this fundamentally flawed policy. How on earth would the President then hope to be able to deliver on his policy in the first place in such an eventuality? It evident that this is likely to be a stillbirth.
Although it would be too little, too late, Mr Museveni still just needs to get his act together in terms of managing the country’s resources and finances. Instead of maintaining a bloated parliament which Uganda can ill-afford, and remunerating our MPs european-level salaries from a third world economy, and additionally purchasing vehicles for them worth UGShs200 million, that money could have been rechannelled to the teachers’ wages bill. Or what’s the justification for having the number of cabinet ministers that we have and the concomitant wage bill and expenditure that goes with it? The number of teachers on register is not that big that the country cannot adequately remunerate all teachers equally at the proposed level.
The current crisis around teacher remuneration is political and superficial. A competent government could solve it by a stroke of a pen. After all, Uganda’s education system was once the envy of all sub-Saharan Africa where many of the pre- and post-independence anglophone elite got its education. It is now the laughing stock in the education world. We could by now have been net regional earners from educational services.
Just as one thought things could not get any worse, they are about to deteriorate further yet with this new poorly thought out policy. Our teachers deserve better, Uganda deserves better, this President is running rampage with the future of our country, not unlike Iddi Amin who had the affinity of seeing dreams at night and announcing them as policies the next day. You just cannot afford to run the country like that and expect anything less than what we have got at the moment, after 35 years of trying. The apparent lack of intervention of professionals doesn’t help.
The writer is a Multilingual Human Rights Practitioner, formerly at the International Secretariat of Amnesty International in London for over 20 years and now Legal and Human Rights Consultant.
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