The top management of Makerere University has resolved to immediately suspend Stella Nyanzi, a research fellow who last week stripped naked, defaced the walls at the Makerere Institute for Social Research (MISR), and hurled profanities at director Mahmood Mamdani — Uganda’s foremost academic.

The management also resolved to set up a four-person committee, which, over the next 25 days, is supposed to investigate the disagreement between Dr Nyanzi and Prof Mamdani, the working conditions and environment at MISR, and the management of financial resources.

The committee will also review the management of MISR’s flagship MPhil/PhD programme, the management of research output at the institute, how research fellows relate to the PhD programme, and the staff structure, establishment and reporting hierarchy.

Dr Nyanzi and Prof Mamdani both said they had submitted their complaints to the human resources directorate and the vice chancellor’s office, but they had not been attended to.

The saga has drawn together a strong constituency that has appealed to the university authorities to rescue the PhD programme, the brainchild Prof Mamdani.

Rescue of programme

The constituency comprises seven out of nine academic staff at MISR, a large percentage of the doctoral students, Makerere’s academic staff association, Makerere’s Convocation, and Prof Venansius Baryamureeba, the former VC who hired Prof Mamdani and superintended the introduction of the PhD programme.

They were joined by 40 academics from foreign universities who have been associated with MISR as external research associates or visiting lecturers.

They urged the university and Prof Ssentamu in particular, to regard the programme’s continuance and expansion as a matter of “great importance.”

“Over the course of several years… Mamdani has worked with MISR’s talented teaching staff to create an extraordinarily valuable centre for the training of a new generation of African social scientists.

“It would be a matter of enduring disappointment if, at this early stage, this place of great promise were prematurely closed down,” the academics wrote to Prof Ssentamu on April 20.

According to a 2012 report from the Uganda National Council of Science and Technology, only 11.7 per cent of the total academic staff at Uganda’s universities have PhDs. Most of these are held by old people whose research productivity is dismal, according to the report.

As such, the academics said, any programme to train PhDs should be welcomed with open arms. “We further urge you to take into serious consideration the possibility of renewing Prof Mamdani’s contract as executive director.”

Prof Mamdani’s contract expired in March, 2015, and Makerere delayed to renew it. Since then he has served on a three-month contract that has been repeatedly extended. The current one expires in June.

Naked hostility

On April 18, Dr Stella Nyanzi, stripped naked at the Makerere Institute for Social Research. She claimed that Prof Mahmood Mamdani was causing high staff turnover, favouring some students, exercising nepotism and patriarchy, and making unilateral decisions.

Dr Nyanzi said she was protesting the unfair eviction from her office by Prof Mamdani. He had asked her to vacate the office on April 15.

According to Prof Mamdani, Dr Nyanzi had refused to teach on the MPhil/PhD programme or to carry out any institutional research like any other academic staff at MISR. He said she was using the space for her own private research.