Why didn't Ugandan students at Makerere set up encampments for Gaza?

Students around the world this year have shown us how fed up they were with the ongoing genocide in Gaza, from Berkley to Columbia in the US, to Manchester in the UK, they called for a ceasefire and for their universities and governments to divest from the state of Israel. The anger spread to the African continent too, from Egypt to South Africa as students faced harsh crackdowns from the police and state.

Yet, all the while, our students at Makerere University in Uganda have failed to speak out for the Palestinian people.

Makerere, the oldest university in East Africa was once a well-known hub for intellectual discourse on the continent. It was here that ideologies such as Pan-Africanism found a breeding ground. Students were politically conscious. In the 1960s, they protested against Ian Smith’s government in Rhodesia for the murder of three African nationalists. In 1970, a group of students planned a protest in which they intended to parade in front of the British High Commission in protest of arms sales to South Africa. The army stopped the march before it left campus using tear gas to control them.

It’s therefore not so farfetched to expect the student movement in Makerere to add their voices in support of Gaza.

As a former student organiser who served as the 2019 Makerere Guild Minister for Gender and Ethics, and a Guild Representative of the School of Law in 2018, I will say that the silence of the Makerere students in Palestine is no accident. Rather it is a result of Uganda’s current political space that stifles political expression and conversations through continuous state interference and state violence.

To understand why the Ugandan state has gone far and beyond to stifle student political expression, one has to understand a few facts about its university politics.

Firstly, for the past two decades, Makerere University has been an overwhelmingly opposition stronghold, with its guild presidents being opposition leaning.

Students run for office on national party cards. The popularity of the opposition at the university meant that students were more critical of the state and constantly held protests against its excesses. Some of the protests include the “Tojikwatako” protests in 2017 against the scrapping of the presidential age limit that would enable Uganda's president Yoweri Museveni to rule for life.

Makerere (and likewise other public universities) was also a good recruitment ground for political parties that sought to rally young people to their cause. One only needs to look at the current crop of vibrant leaders in the opposition – Anne Adeke, Asuman Basalirwa, Mukasa Mbidde, Mathias Mpuuga – and will find that most of them started their political journey as student leaders at the university.

Thus, in Museveni’s constant attempt to weaken the opposition in order to achieve his goal of life presidency – Makerere University has always been a key that he must keep under his thumb so as to keep his regime in power.

Makerere has been opposition leaning for the last twenty years. While there were guild presidents from Museveni’s ruling party at the start of his reign, when he was still popular, the switch to outright rejection of any guild president from his party is in response to his relentless pursuit of life presidency. He has now been in power for 38 years .

In 2018, the state even went to the extent of setting up military bases on university grounds, allegedly on invitation from university authorities, although it was never clear why the university would want them there.

Not long after, there were reports that the men in uniform were harassing both students and staff, with students claiming that the soldiers were limiting their movements on campus and issuing arbitrary punishment like forcing them to frog jump, slapping them, or evicting them from university premises.

Not even the former Deputy Vice Chancellor Ernest Okello Ogwang was spared. He was severely beaten after failing to prove his identity to the soldiers. The military has however denied these allegations and often claimed that their presence on the university premises was with the permission of the university.

In 2019, when students gathered to protest the 15% increment on tuition - now known as “Fees Must Fall”, we were met with extreme state brutality.

The increment had led to the drop out of over 1000 students in its first year of implementation. We protested. In response we were assaulted, tear gassed and arrested by the military. Some of the student leaders went missing, and others allegedly taken to unknown places by security forces. There were also allegations that the army had sexually assaulted some female students.

These days, the university is under the state’s thumb. President Museveni’s son-in-law Edwin Karugire is the chairperson of the university’s appointment board that is responsible for appointment, promotion, removal of all staff in both academic and administrative roles at the university.

The First Lady Janet Museveni who doubles as the Ministry of Education also sends representatives to the council.

The Vice Chancellor is equally seen by critics as eager to do the bidding of the state. He has suspended students involved in protests, sometimes indefinitely. These suspensions usually follow no due process and students are not allowed a fair hearing. He has overseen the introduction of new policies that ban student assemblies, political parties and open campaigns stifling any outlets for students to organise around issues of interest or even seek accountability from their leaders.

With the Ugandan state infringing on the political and academic freedoms of students at Makerere University, students have now turned to Whatsapp and X (formerly Twitter) to have any kind of political discourse.

On Gaza, or any other political issue of the day, social media may continue to be the only outlet through which Ugandan students can express themselves without fear of fierce crackdown.