UTAMU, communication and the sweetness and allure of a presidential chair

Prof Venansius Baryamureeba, the founding Vice-Chancellor of the Uganda Technology and Management University (UTAMU), and my former vice-chancellor at Makerere, is out to unseat President Yoweri Museveni.

The illustrious don announced last week his intention to run for the presidency early next year.

I last met Prof Baryamureeba sometime ago at a State function in Kampala. We were launching Katondoozi, a thesaurus (or synonym dictionary) of that cluster of southern Ugandan languages comprising Runyakore, Rukiga and Ruhororo.

President Yoweri Museveni, a Runyankore speaker, is the principal author of the monumental work, hence the special importance of the occasion. Many of us had been invited as academics, and especially as practitioners from the then Institute of Languages at Makerere. Of course, I took the opportunity to congratulate my colleagues, Manuel Muranga, Gilbert Gumoshabe and Alice Muhoozi, the President’s co-authors.

I came upon Baryamureba standing alone, intently observing the crème de la crème of Uganda’s political and academic elite as they interacted over cocktails in the luxurious gardens of the International Conference Centre. I suspect that he finds it difficult to ever turn his critical faculty down to a level necessary for uninhibited socialisation.

Interrupt meditation

Anyway, I decided to interrupt his sweet meditation and hail him for good old times’ sake. I congratulated him on his newly-established private university, UTAMU, and that seemed to turn him on.

He heartily invited me to visit his fast-growing establishment, housed in the impressive Twed Towers, across Yusuf Lule Road from the Kampala Golf Course.

I accepted the invitation gladly partly because, to my incurably childlike mind, I liked the acronym for his institution. UTAMU, to us Waswahili, obviously suggests sweetness and few of us who are eternally young at heart can resist that, whether in sugar, fruit or kindness of behaviour.

But more seriously, I felt greatly honoured by the invitation because I deeply respect Baryamureba’s academic record. I also know how justifiably proud he is of UTAMU, his brainchild, and a practical demonstration of creative thinking outside the box.

Leaving the vice-chancellor’s chair at the very young age of 43, Barya was expected to return to his faculty of computer science, where he had been the founding dean.

But the ICT professor had had enough of Makerere. After all, his tenure as vice-chancellor had been conspicuously controversial, with several run-ins with students, staff and other stakeholders.

It could only compete, in strife, with that of my former colleague at Kenyatta University, Prof Isaac Omolo Ndiege, as vice-chancellor of Uganda’s second top public  school, Kyambogo University.

So, for Barya, as his friends call him, out of the VC office meant out of Makerere. What surprised most of us was that he ventured directly into the tremendously challenging business of private tertiary education.

UTAMU is an elaborate outfit with high ambitions of becoming the best ICT degree-awarding institution in East Africa. Apparently, the shrewd professor had been hatching the idea long before he threw in the towel at Makerere.

But now, here he is, a few weeks away from the first UTAMU graduation, throwing his hat into the ring for the presidency. Will he make it? Could Uganda have a President Venansius Baryamureba, come 2016? Hazarding a guess requires a very elaborate analysis of the current Ugandan political landscape, for which I do not have the head.

But Barya’s bid is being taken more seriously than those of most others, including that of my clansman and namesake, Prof Gilbert Bukenya, a former vice-president. To most observers, the significance of Baryamureba’s candidacy lies in its implication that, maybe, a new and younger generation is ready and willing to relieve my agemates of their heavy leadership burdens and assign them appropriate advisory roles.

My problem, however, is that I have not yet made my visit to UTAMU. I delayed because I was trying to prepare a short presentation for the professor, regarding communication.

One of my pet ideas, as you probably know, is that competent communication should be an integral part of every teaching and training programme at every level of our education, including university and professional formation.      

I am speaking here of the basic ability to convey and receive messages efficiently. The main foundation of this ability is competent and confident listening, speech, writing and reading: language, in other words.

A language scholar and teacher once said that the generations of the latter 20th century were told a pathetic lie. This was that one did not have to be taught one’s mother tongue.

In East Africa, we seem to be perpetrating and perpetuating another lie. This is the assumption that the formal learning of language ends and is complete at secondary school.

Language is used at different levels, and a person’s level of language use should correspond to that person’s level of educational and professional sophistication. It is a folly to assume that secondary school language competence is sufficient for a lawyer, an accountant, a doctor or professional preacher.

In Kenya recently, we heard of magistrates being relieved of their duties because they could not write an articulate judgment. In Uganda’s public universities, it is becoming a requirement for applicants for undergraduate courses in subjects like law and medicine to sit and pass an aptitude test. These tests do not measure legal or medical knowledge but communication skills.

As a language teacher, I know that the greatest impediment for graduate students, even those in the literary and linguistic fields, is self-expression.

It leaves you wondering what happens in other fields! These are some of the observations I would like to share with Prof Baryamureba and his fellow educational luminaries, with the suggestion that every course taught at university should have a formal language improvement component.

If Barya is receptive to my promptings, maybe I will volunteer some further advice to him. I may intimate to him that, despite the “sweetness” of that top chair, revealed by one of its previous occupants, Godfrey Binaisa, nothing is likely to beat the flavour at UTAMU. 

Prof Bukenya is among the leading scholars in English and literature in East Africa.