How did university student unions in Sub-Saharan Africa change from elitist factions that engaged in protests against social and political injustices and undemocratic governance of colonialists and misrule of Africa’s ‘big men’ into offshoots and arms of political parties within authoritarian regimes in the region?
That is one of the questions arising from a study by Andrea Kronstad Felde, a PhD candidate in political science at the University of Bergen in Norway, which focused on the politicisation of Makerere University Students’ Guild (the Students’ Guild) by the current mainstream political parties in Uganda. Such parties include the ruling National Resistance Movement (NRM) and the National Unity Platform (NUP).
Felde’s study, ‘Opening the black box of student government in authoritarian contexts: Institutional work and intra organisational conflicts in the Students’ Guild at Makerere University, Uganda’, that was published in Springer’s journal Higher Education on 29 April 2024 not only provides insight into student governance at Makerere, but the ‘black box’ also shows that past flames of student radical advocacy have been extinguished.
At Makerere, the oldest university in Eastern and Central Africa, Felde found that the Students’ Guild is tied to political parties, as well as embedded in an autocratic political environment. This environment is characterised by uncertainty, ethnic affiliations, fragmentation and contestation by political parties to influence the Students’ Guild, causing frequent internal divisions that are detrimental to student academic interests.
Party strife a cause of concern
“Understanding this case contributes to a better understanding of student governments in other Sub-Saharan African [countries], authoritarian or post-colonial settings, as it expands on the understanding of students’ institutional behaviour and institutional ambiguity in authoritarian states,” Felde stated.
But, while most of the students who talked to Felde were concerned about the strife caused by rival political parties’ ambitions to influence decision-making at the Students’ Guild, there were no aims to abolish party politics within the student body, as it was hard for students to imagine a Students’ Guild free from such influence.
According to the study, the students aligned to the NRM of President Yoweri Museveni expressed concern about how the NUP led by Robert Kyagulanyi Ssentamu influenced the Students’ Guild and vice versa. However, there were no critical speculations on how the parties they supported could have negatively impacted the Students’ Guild.
Felde pointed out that, when her respondents at Makerere indicated that they wanted to disrupt party politics from the Students’ Guild, it only meant cutting short the influence of opposing political parties. In this regard, Felde noted that, during elections for the Students’ Guild’s leadership, the latent party conflict had split into the formation of ‘candidate teams’ and students voted on party lines.
Student activists a different species
What is emerging is that, over the years, university students in Makerere and elsewhere in Sub-Saharan Africa have almost ceased to be romantic political actors and admirers of revolutionaries and democracy defenders such as Che Guevara, Martin Luther King Jr, Nelson Mandela and Thomas Sankara.
According to Professor Maurice Amutabi, a historian and the director of the Centre for Science and Technology Studies at the Technical University of Kenya, the student movement in Africa had, for years, managed, almost uniquely, to hold aloft the banner of the democratic principles on the continent. But the extreme poverty of campus life has forced university students in many countries in Africa into the company of ‘hustlers’, the ordinary poor people on the continent who are struggling to survive daily.
Such views are also held by Dr Leo Zeilig, a commentator and keen observer of unfolding political and historical developments in Africa and, until last year, a senior research fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London.
He has pointed out that the fortunes of student activism in Africa came under sustained attack in the 1980s and 1990s when the policies of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank reversed the generous funding of universities. “This cast student activists into a world transformed by political and economic forces,” stated Zeilig in a study that traced how the reality of student poverty and the financial crises facing African universities has defined student political activities and commitment in the 21st century.
Subsequently, the austerity measures imposed on the public universities by the Bretton Woods institutions and national governments turned the ivory tower upside down and relegated the students from a group of privileged elites to customers of higher education and their lecturers as service providers.
Student autonomy eroded
Highlighting the issue, Professor Ibrahim Oanda Ogachi, the head of research at the Mastercard Foundation, says the era of fragmentation of radical student movements that protested internal descent into authoritarianism in most countries in Sub-Saharan Africa was evident in the 1980s, although university students were among the forces that brought about Africa’s second liberation in the 1990s.
Citing the Kenyan experience, Ogachi argues that, whereas most African universities were intellectually vibrant in the 1960s and 1970s, the collapse of facilities such as libraries, bookstores and research facilities, led to inadequate teaching personnel and poor staff development from the early 1980s.
According to Ogachi, that scenario hurt students in Kenya’s universities while the government instituted policies to erode academic freedom and reduced student representation in key university bodies, a factor that turned student organisations into weak pressure groups.
“In effect, the state took direct control of the universities, and student autonomy to organise was eroded,” said Ogachi, who is also a former senior programme officer at the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa.
He said that, since the turn of the century, most governments in Sub-Saharan Africa have managed to draw student leaders away from leftist politics and radical activism by manipulating student elections or promising them jobs to the extent that most student representatives now appear as an extension of university management and not the representatives of students.
Opulence marks student leaders
Whether in Kenya or Uganda, the gap between university student leaders and the general student body in terms of opulence appears to be too wide. “Student leaders are increasingly offered jobs either at the universities or other state apparatuses after graduation and, in the face of youth unemployment, this has become the bait that has undermined student representation and its ideological leaning,” Ogachi said.
During her research at Makerere, Felde found that corrupt behaviour in the form of clientelism, disbursing benefits, buying patronage and vote bribing was regarded as normalised in Students’ Guild elections. “This was to the extent that politics in Makerere is regarded as a business initiative,” Felde stated.
Similarly, whereas, at the University of Nairobi, the elections of the University of Nairobi Students Association, or UNSA, are not openly based on political party lines, outside interference is visible. In this regard, the days are gone when student leaders campaigned for office wearing simple undergraduate gowns.
Today, aspirants seeking the Students’ Guild leadership at Makerere, according to Ogachi, are expected to dress up, drive fancy cars and be accompanied by a convoy of equally ostentatious-looking vehicles as they move from hall to hall to campaign. “They are also expected to provide music at the venues, print posters, and provide beverages and alcohol to their supporters – and all these cost money.”
Potential leaders cannot compete
So far, there are indicators that students who have the potential to be good leaders do not put themselves forward for election because they lack the kind of money that political parties pump into the campaigns. Subsequently, the evolving nature of academic freedom and the eventual student participation in university governance is increasingly getting complicated with the entry of party politics.
Besides, considering that some students campaign for student leadership with the support of ethnically inclined politicians, some researchers are worried about the damage that is likely to cause to students. In this regard, questions are emerging as to whether the infiltration of student leadership by national politics at Makerere and elsewhere would lead to the balkanisation of the student body by creating partisan camps.
Unanswered questions remain as to what extent the partnership between national political and student organisations such as the Students’ Guild might have contributed to the loss of academic freedom among the students. As one of Felde’s respondents stated, ‘politics in Makerere is fading’, one wonders whether many such university students in Sub-Saharan Africa have started losing hope in their unions as democratic and independent bodies that could regain their past as the vuvuzela of the voiceless in Africa.
University World News
