“Life was never going to be the same for Polly Bandola, the moment he betrayed students and pushed forward a recommendation that was not thoroughly discussed and for which, no student at Makerere had been consulted” remarked a one Louis, former student at Makerere and one of Bandola’s oldest friends.
Bandola, as Chairman of Mitchell Hall, was selected to lead a 7-man committee that was supposed to investigate the cause of tuition strikes at Makerere and make necessary recommendations that would hurt neither the student body nor the management and administration of the university.
The 7 member committee traveled across various universities around the region including University of Nairobi, Uganda Christian University, Gulu University among others to benchmark how the said institutions have been managing situations like tuition increment.
“His mistake was thinking that to solve the problems at Makerere, tuition had to be increased and as such, didn’t look into other factors like how the current revenues of the university are handled by management. An Auditor General’s report of 2017 was in his face in which billions of shillings were unaccounted for but he gave it a blind eye. His mission was to find out how best, tuition could be increased at Makerere University” an observer who preferred anonymity told Campus Bee.
His seven man committee consisted, among others, Marion Kirabo the current Guild Minister of Gender who later unceremoniously resigned from her GRC Position at Law School saying he had been played into allowing to recommend tuition increment at Makerere University. At the moment, he is among the female caucus that started the strike and has already received her fair warning from the tough talking Nawangwe if she dare keeps organising strikes.
Consequently, Bandola’s committee came up with a report which it officially handed over to the Makerere University Council Chairperson Dr Charles Wana-Etyem in the presence of both the then guild president Were Salim, then guild speaker Isaac Kwagala and the university’s Vice-Chancellor Prof Barnabas Nawangwe.
In their report, the committee suggested a number of issues fronting a 15% tuition increment across all programs as the major recommendation. The report suggested that the 15% increment should only apply to new students effective with the academic year 2018/2019 for the next 5 years totalling to 75% instead of the 91% that was earlier suggested by management.
Even with protests from the Guild Representatives, who by the way held a press conference and disowned the recommendation, Bandola and his group held their heads high. At that moment, they were the university sweethearts and they thought it would stay that way.
Just a year later, Bandola was chased out of Mitchell Hall like a rat on the highway. He had served his purpose of increasing tuition for Nawangwe and with no strikes looming, Nawangwe didn’t find him purposeful. It was because of that, that even when he cried out and said that he was framed and all those things placed in his room, his guardian Angel Nawangwe didn’t come to his rescue.
A bright Medical student in the days, Bandola’s future was purposefully laid ahead for him to fit in it. He was going to complete his degree and probably grow to be one of the best doctors in the field out there. But right now, it will take him years to paint the drug addict picture away from himself.
They said he threatened to burn down his hall and had bought fuel for that purpose and that he was taking in girls and intoxicating them with drugs to near death. You can call that paying the price of betrayal (even Judas Iscariot paid) but let us wait and see how he recovers from that.
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