There must be academic policies that encourage strong re connection of knowledge in Makerere University like in other great Universities of the world.
By Oweyegha-Afunaduula
21 February 2024.
Recently I wrote an article titled “How I revolutionized environmental training at Makerere University, Uganda”. The purpose was really to tell you about the role I played to proliferate environmental training across the university curriculum.
I understood that (i)there would be no meaningful and effective conservation in Uganda unless environmental training in the Humanities and Social Sciences across academic territorial and disciplinary boundaries; (ii) disconnecting the humanities, social science and natural science was an antithesis of environmental conservation, which does not respect academic borders; (iii) the crusade for environmental conservation needed academic and intellectual cadres in and across the territorial boundaries between the humanities, social science and natural science; and (iv) environmentally knowledgeable, literate and conscious graduates must be the
primary goal of a university’s academic and intellectual advances. While we need academic environmentalists to teach, research and publish environmentally -relevant papers, we need environmental intellectuals to identify, articulate and clarify environmental problems and issues for the general public.
This, however, is possible only where the particular academia and societies to be open enough for academics and intellectuals to challenge held myths and beliefs that do not serve the perpetuity and integrity of the environment and its conservation for present and future generations.
This thinking is critical to building an environmental culture at all levels of society that does not segregate between knowledge workers and learners. It is for this reason, in anticipation of Makerere University deconstructing itself structurally and functionally to allow environmental training and learning across its curriculum, that in 1994 I wrote an article titled “Towards Environmentally Conscious Curriculum Design at Makerere University, Uganda”. The article was published in Dialogue (Kampala, Uganda), Volume 1 Issue 1 (pages 30—33). The article may be easily and conveniently
found in the AFRICABIB-ORG Bibliographic Database, but a Google Search could also enable a serious researcher to access it.
There is no alternative to producing graduates that can think, reason and write across academically imposed territorial and disciplinary barriers in a century of increasing interconnectivity and environmental destruction. When I wrote the article cited above, my thinking was that in the 21st century we would need graduates that would be able to work in teams, think critically, and be ready professionally for the future. I thought we would need to rethink our “curriculum thinking” to accommodate the increasing centrality of the environment in human affairs at all levels of society.
Unfortunately, we are continuing to produce graduates in the same fashion we did in the 20th Century as if we do not want our country to belong to the 21st Century and beyond Given the vast environmental “unconsciousness” at Makerere University and most universities of the world, it is clear my 1994 article was not taken seriously by university curriculum designers. They were mired in what they knew best: designing disciplinary curricula to produce graduates that could not work in teams, who glorified their individual achievements, and who did not attach any significance to critical thinking and sustainability of their professions in fast-changing environments.
Environmental thinking and training continued, and continues, to be more or less optional.
Multitudes of graduates stream out the gates of universities without any environmental training, and if some are, it is in the natural sciences. Yet no progress will be made against our wicked problems such as climate change and political segregation of the sciences (natural science, humanities and social science) unless the centrality of the environment in higher education is recognized and entrenched. We continue just talking and thinking about the environment as a means to gain
acceptability in the global community of peoples and institutions (including universities).
In this article I want to emphasize that universities, which will not fully open up to environmental thinking, reasoning, training and leaning across boundaries, will not contribute significantly to revolutionizing education as a whole to be able to produce environmentally knowledgeable, literate and conscious graduates at all levels of the education system. Their graduates will constitute a group that will be environmentally burdensome to protecting our environment against the excesses of humanity. It is true Man is almost the beginning of all environmental problems and the victim of their consequences.
I am happy in my lifetime as a scholar, I tried to ensure long before and since the beginning of the 21st Century territories to proliferate environmental training and learning across academic territorial and academic tribal boundaries towards producing more holistic and rounded graduates. My preoccupation was to reconnect knowledge for the environment within a strongly disciplinarily structured and functional university. However, reconnecting knowledge for the environment is not
something that will be sustainably successful if it is pursued by individual academics rather than institutionally. There must be academic policies that encourage such reconnection of knowledge for the environment.
Academics seeking to reconnect knowledge must first reconnect mind-wise with many scholars and professionals within and outside the university structure and function. If it continued to be individual academics seeking re connection of knowledge, disconnection of knowledge may ensue as soon as such individual academics are no longer integral to the body politic of the university’s knowledge enterprise.
There is no doubt that my role in integrated environmental concern and conservation is coming to an end as I advance in age. However, I have already written widely on the critical need of 21st Century universities to embrace new knowledge production through the knowledge cultures of interdisciplinarity, crossdisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity and extradisciplinarity. All these can coexist with disciplinarity in any knowledge enterprise such as that of Makerere University. What is needed
is to design academic policies to allow these different knowledge cultures to coexist and benefit from each other. Instead of producing graduates that are predominantly disciplinary as if the environment is disciplinary, it is possible to simultaneously produce interdisciplinary, crossdisciplinary, transdisciplinary and transdisciplinary graduates. Therefore, we can knowledge workers in the same knowledge enterprise who are professors, associate professors, senior lecturers and lecturers who are able to mix in teams and produce knowledge for environmental conservation rather knowledge for environmental disintegration, which disciplinary knowledge production has excelled in doing for decades.
We must open up to them if we are going to create environmentally suitable university campuses that can push the green environmental agenda in the 21st Century. In other words, our universities must create policies to break barriers to communication between academics belonging to different territories and tribes of knowledge and create new channels of communication for teaching or training for effective environmental conservation.
Because our graduates were wrongly trained but are in positions of decision-making at all levels of society and in different stations of life, they are the ones at the centre of land-grabbing and environmental destruction in all dimensions of the environment. They are the ones innovating policies and strategies for development that are environmentally ignorant, illiterate and unconscious.
I will not name them. Researchers can make them foci of research to establish how environmentally knowledgeable, environmentally literate and environmentally conscious they are for the 21st Century – a Century of new and different knowledge, education, communication and environment, and requiring revolutionization of how we train our young people at all levels of education.
In my article “How I revolutionized environmental training at Makerere University, Uganda”, I claimed that many of my students of environmental Science (in the Faculty of Science), Environmental Management or The Politics of the Environment (in Political Science and Public Administration) and Environmental Planning and Management (in Social Work and Social Administration) are the Professors, Associate Professors and Senior Lecturers at Makerere University and many Universities
in and outside Uganda. This is true. However, it is also true that hundreds of my students in these environmental fields are scattered in numerous fields of human endeavour, not only in East Africa and the Great Lakes Region but also globally. I don’t know how meaningfully and effectively they are putting the knowledge they got to use towards conserving the environment. However, it is usually enabling policies and the kind of socioeconomic and sociopolitical environment they find themselves
that will either spur or discourage them to think and act for the environment in all its dimensions.
When you are a teacher or lecturer you can remember or not remember many of your students. If I had the power and the means I would reassemble all of them to find out what each of them is doing to save our environment. Some of my former students are:
1. Professor John Tabuti – College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, Makerere University.
2. Professor Vincent Muwanika – College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, Makerere University.
3. Hon Henry Banyenzaki – Former Minister of State for Economic Monitoring, Uganda now Chief of Party for the African Parliamentary Network on SDGs.
4. Hon. Dr. Chris Baryomunsi – Ministers of CIT and National Guidance, Uganda.
5. Ambassador Henry Mayega, Consul General of Uganda’s Consulate in Dubai – the United Arab Emirates.
6. Late John Mitala – former Head of Public Service, Uganda.
7. Dr. Jennifer Musisi, the founding executive director of KCCA, Uganda.
8. Professor Ronald Karyeija – Uganda Management Institute.
9. Simon Sekankya – the Proprietor of Hardware World (the leading Hardware Store now in Uganda) – Simon started with Standard Chartered Bank, before setting up his Hardware business.
10. Mesach Nuwabine- Now Works in the administration of Parliament of Uganda. Mesach previously served as an administrator in several Ministries.
11. Dr Patrick Ibembe – had a long career spanning 3 decades as top civil servant (As a Special advisor to the President and Charman of Several State Parastatals). He is also Chair to several Non-state Organizations.
12. Peninah Karungi – Works with Uganda Revenue Authority.
13. Professor Denis Sekiwu – Kabale University.
14. Isaac Kabongo – Executive Director, Ecological Christian Organization
15 Dr Akankwasa – Executive Director, National Environmental Management Authority.
16 Professor Umah Kakumba –
17 Professor Edward Bbale –
18 Honorable Florence Nakiwala Kiyingi
19 Honorable Alicante Alaso
The list can extend to hundreds, but I lack space show to what extent my efforts to educate beyond the boundaries of academic territories and academic tribes pioneered the training of environmentally knowledgeable, literate and conscious graduates for the 21st Century. Makerere University must deconstruct itself structurally and functionally to continue institutionally the process of training and producing graduates that we need for 21st Century environmental conservation in all dimensions of the environment (i.e., ecological-biological, socioeconomic, sociocultural and temporal). We shall then get the professors, associate professors, senior lecturers and lecturers we need to produce for us graduates that value integrated team rather individual achievement and glorification. The 21st Century is longing for this transition sooner than later. A lot of interdisciplinary, cross disciplinary, transdisciplinary and extradisciplinary literature as well as human resources exist to make Makerere University undertake the transition.
For God and My Country
