Makerere University law school is seeking financial independence to run it’s executive course that is scheduled to take effect starting with next month. Students enrolling for this particular course shall study on weekends and will pay five million shillings unlike the ones on the normal programme who are paying 1.7 million shillings. This therefore makes the executive bachelor of laws programme the most costly at Makerere University.
The school says that with financial independence, it will be able to control the finances, retain and invest profits to grow and improve the program. The law dons suggest that for this to be achieved, the program shouldn’t be run under the integrated financial management systems. (IFMIS).
This executive course was birthed from disagreements between the school and university management on the remuneration of lecturers on the evening programme. This evening programme had been on since 1992 when the school started and it has been admitting a second set of students who would study from 5pm to 9pm, Monday to Friday and from 8am to 5:30pm on Saturdays.
This kind of arrangement was made to allow persons who would have loved to study the law course but could not manage to attend the day programme to also attain a qualification . It was also started as an avenue for the school to generate additional income for staff welfare and general school needs.
However, the evening programme came with additional responsibilities for both the academic and non-academic staff and has over the years run into problems especially to do with respect and staff remuneration. Many of the allowances that were given to lecturers, custodians for working for extra hours were scrapped off with time and right now the evening programme at law school is no more because of the disagreements that came up, including the one in 2013 when the staff laid down their tools demanding for 100% salary increment and in 2016 when the university failed to pay the staff’s incentives.
