Makerere University postgraduate students from the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences (CAES) are complaining following the continued delay of their admission letters and university identity cards.
The students, who were awarded scholarships by the college to pursue postgraduate studies at the mentioned university have not received official admission letters from the university despite studying for more than a year now.
The bitter students (both local and international) complain that having no admissions and university IDs shows that they were not officially admitted, something that continues to worry them given the time already invested studying at Uganda’s biggest public university.
More details indicate that they were awarded scholarships to pursue Master and Doctorate degrees under the Makerere University Regional Centre for Crop Improvement (MaRCCI) programme funded by World Bank on a $6m (about Shs22.2 billion) grant.
University officials who preferred anonymity said that some of the international students from Burundi, Ghana, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda and Tanzania were forced to return to their respective countries after failing to secure admissions at Makerere.
“They have wasted my time and money. It was not easy to get a study leave from my workplace and I reach here there is all this mess,” one of the bitter students said.
According to Jane Onyango the CAES public relations officer, the programme director, Dr Richard Edema, who is supposed to address the matter is out of the country.
“Makerere is not a secondary school where admission can happen anytime of the year. These students applied after studying for a year. There should be an advert they were responding to and it had a deadline. This is an irregularity. If it is allowed to go on, it sets a bad precedent that people can do what they want at anytime. The bad characters can compromise the quality of teaching at the institution,” an official who didn’t want to be revealed blamed students for applying late.
However, Prof Buyinza Mukadasi, the Director of Makerere University Directorate of Research and Graduate Training said that something had gone wrong explaining that the problem is more administrative that academic.
“The process was not well managed. It could have been managed better. The board cannot admit without minutes from the School of Higher Degrees recommending successful applicants. In this case, the students formally applied recently and have been considered at the board level. It is upon Senate to admit retrospectively or defer them to the next intake. The students have been around studying. They have the requirements to the programme,” Prof Mukadasi said.
He added that Dr Edema, the principal investigator, was warned and advised to follow university processes to avoid giving scholarships to students who can not be admitted.
“If you have a grant, you can only give scholarships not admission to the university. If not, you stand a risk of giving a scholarship to a person who is not admissible to Makerere University. We have cautioned our young professor never to do it again. He should follow university processes,” Prof Mukadasi added.
The total number of post-graduate students who applied for consideration for the 2018/19 intake remains unknown.
