Students strike because they are surbodinated

SCHOOL STRIKES

A spectre looms above our heads in regards to equity in social discourse. It is important to understanding that in the new millennia, students are not subordinates, but key stakeholders in the education system. The persistent condescending attitude towards students in Ugandan is very problematic. In fact, it is thwarting growth, retarding our civilization, and to a greater extent, lowering the quality of our education.

School strikes, demonstrations, and all forms of civil resistance in our schools confirm that the education system itself is repressive. Strikes and demonstrations are merely a response to this objectionable colonial domination that typifies life in our public institutions.

The RedPepper Tabloid, on its April 1^st, 2015 edition reported that Prof. Mondo Kagonyera, the Chancellor of Makerere University advised employers not to hire students who participate in strikes because such students are undisciplined. This speech was delivered at the 12^th graduation ceremony of Makerere Business Institute (MBI) at Kikoni, in Kampala.

We all agree with Prof Kagonyera that strikes may lead to destruction of resources, bringing huge setback to private and public investments. However, the good Professor needs to be reminded that strikes are never intended course of action for students to resolve grievances. Students, like all other citizens, have found themselves facing difficult times, bad governance, repressive university policies, and alienation, such that strikes or demonstrations have become a broader social movement for mobilizing efforts at confronting these oppressive and repressive policies, and degrading human conditions.

 It is not that I support or promote the culture of strikes. Already, strikes in Uganda have found a life of their own among the disgruntled. More-so, it is ingrained in the perceptions of the managers of our affairs who refuses to recognize that those they manage are developmental partners, not subordinates.

Students are stakeholders in school administration and day-to-day management of schools. In most cases, they are treated as recipients of education services and denied decision making. When you investigate the reasons for most strikes in Ugandan schools, you will find some disturbing trends of radical exclusionism.

For example in October of 2014, pupils from Ngora School for the Blind went on strike in protest of their unfortunate living conditions and horrible foods. An elaborate article by Ivan Okuda ran in the Daily Monitor of July 2013, titled: What is fueling school strikes in Uganda. It provides insight into various school strikes, such as those at Ntare School, Mbarara High School, Kitagata SS and others. Prof Kagonyera should familiar himself with this article to gain insight as to why students go on strike.

The bottom-line is that our education institutions are the foundation of the culture of oppression, repression and impunity. The school system has failed to treat students as stakeholders, contrary to the recommendation in 1992 White Paper on Education, which recommended that students be given equal space and place at all levels of decision making.

To this date, strikes have become the corpus of public response to bad governance due to lack of accessible alternative medium of mediation to students. Every day I read the Ugandan media, reports of people demonstrating; youths running street battles with the Police, and Opposition figures being whipped to pulp by the police are commonplace. These running battles in the street reveal the high intolerance to divergence and yet we are ironically incapable of convergence on any matter.

The school system is still transmitting totalitarianism where it tries as much to galvanize and control all aspects of the students' public and private lives.  We forget that such systems were successful when access to information was a privilege for a few educated people. Public administration was then defined by control over information, something which is impossible with the advent of globalization, internet and social media!

Time is showing that the preserve of absolute control conflicts, naturally, with the values of the millennium youths who are more privy to instantaneity. They are bold and confident in their resolve to seek instant solution, were any delay is considered a strife.

Rampant strikes are a malfunction of the education system as a whole. Unless student are treated as equal stakeholders in the system, they will continue to feel alienated by the system. Their roles in school strikes should never determine their prospects in an empowering employment environment which promotes innovation, partnerships and transcendence.

 END.