mtanganyika wa kweli
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A PETITION TO PROF. ISSA SHIVJI ASKING HIM TO DECLINE PROF. MAMDANI’S INVITATION TO GIVE A TALK AT MISR
January 23, 2018
Dear Prof Issa Shivji.
We salute you in the name of the working people of the world to whose cause you have always dedicated your scholarship and activism.
We have learnt, with great shock, that you have accepted an invitation to give a talk on “The Colonial and Postcolonial Architecture of Land in Tanzania” at the Makerere Institute of Social Research (MISR) which is currently under the directorship of Prof Mahmood Mamdani. We acknowledge that the topic of the talk is timely. However, the place where the talk is to take place is not conducive. Accepting an invitation from an institution that is directed by one of the most heavy-handed, prejudiced and vindictive administrators betrays your credible record against authoritarian leadership that stifles the autonomy of academic institutions, socially and politically relevant scholarship and the thriving of democratic culture in academic institutions.
(1) At its founding stage, MISR promised to produce socially and politically relevant scholars and in effect attracted students from all over the African continent and beyond who saw the materialization of this promise. MISR has utterly failed to create a democratic institutional environment for its students, faculty and workers to thrive and become courageous political subjects within and outside their institution.
(2) Thanks to the funding from organisations like the Carnegie Corporation, MISR is run like a personal fiefdom of Prof Mahmood Mamdani. Under Prof Mamdani’s Machiavellian management style, fear and victimization of students and staff have become the order of the day. As a result:
(a) Out of a student population of 41 in 2016, there were more than 10 complaints of academic and disciplinary victimization by Prof Mahmood Mamdani and his despotic lieutenant, Dr Lyn Ossome. All these students have now been forced out of MISR in spite of having won their complaints at the University tribunals. MISR, with impunity, declined to communicate to the affected students the verdict of the College’s Examination, Irregularities and Appeals Committee. More students have voluntarily quit the MISR programme and joined other institutions.
(b) Ten members of teaching staff have left MISR due specifically to the acrimonious relationship with the Director. Some of these had 5 year contracts and decided to leave at the beginning of their contracts. One of the recent cases includes an instructor who has left MISR on malicious grounds after MISR, without copying in the affected instructor, wrote to Makerere University to withdraw its support and recommendation of a 5 year contract.
(c) Ten support staff (cleaners, messengers, drivers and secretaries) who rebelled against mistreatment by the administration (such as being referred to as ‘dogs’ and denied working tools so that they don’t work and consequently get fired) and the plan to replace them with a private firm, have been unceremoniously expelled (7 of them) or involuntarily transferred to other departments within Makerere (3 of them). These acts, wrote the Makerere Branch Secretary of NUEI (a trade union to which the MISR support staff appealed) in his April 13th 2016 letter to Prof Mamdani, “are not acceptable under the employment act and inhuman in the face of humanity.”
(3) The values inculcated by MISR money are not those of solidarity, social engagement, intellectual independence, equity and social justice that you have fought for in your life. Through its funding and administrative model, MISR is inclined to produce scholars that are taciturn, self-advancing and well–adjusted to injustice.
It is against this background that we ask you to decline the invitation to give a talk at the Makerere Institute of Social Research. We are afraid that your name will be used to legitimize the gross acts of oppression taking place at the Institute. This won’t be your first time. In 2003, following the US invasion of Iraq, you declined, at the eleventh hour, the invitation to give a paper on “Remaking Law in Africa” in the UK. “I am afraid,” you wrote to the organisers “I cannot simply bring myself to attend these conferences” amid the “current assault and massacre of law, justice and humanity by the most rapacious imperial power on earth.”
Today we are asking you to show the same spirit to a very tyrannical administrator on the continent’s academic circles!
Signatories:
1. Sabatho Nyamsenda (Tanzania)
2. Noosim Naimasiah (Kenya)
3. Charles Prempeh (Ghana)
4. Mahir Balunywa (Uganda)
5. Semeneh Ayalew (Ethiopia)
6. Bernard Baha (Tanzania)
7. Philip Oketcho (Uganda)
January 23, 2018
Dear Prof Issa Shivji.
We salute you in the name of the working people of the world to whose cause you have always dedicated your scholarship and activism.
We have learnt, with great shock, that you have accepted an invitation to give a talk on “The Colonial and Postcolonial Architecture of Land in Tanzania” at the Makerere Institute of Social Research (MISR) which is currently under the directorship of Prof Mahmood Mamdani. We acknowledge that the topic of the talk is timely. However, the place where the talk is to take place is not conducive. Accepting an invitation from an institution that is directed by one of the most heavy-handed, prejudiced and vindictive administrators betrays your credible record against authoritarian leadership that stifles the autonomy of academic institutions, socially and politically relevant scholarship and the thriving of democratic culture in academic institutions.
(1) At its founding stage, MISR promised to produce socially and politically relevant scholars and in effect attracted students from all over the African continent and beyond who saw the materialization of this promise. MISR has utterly failed to create a democratic institutional environment for its students, faculty and workers to thrive and become courageous political subjects within and outside their institution.
(2) Thanks to the funding from organisations like the Carnegie Corporation, MISR is run like a personal fiefdom of Prof Mahmood Mamdani. Under Prof Mamdani’s Machiavellian management style, fear and victimization of students and staff have become the order of the day. As a result:
(a) Out of a student population of 41 in 2016, there were more than 10 complaints of academic and disciplinary victimization by Prof Mahmood Mamdani and his despotic lieutenant, Dr Lyn Ossome. All these students have now been forced out of MISR in spite of having won their complaints at the University tribunals. MISR, with impunity, declined to communicate to the affected students the verdict of the College’s Examination, Irregularities and Appeals Committee. More students have voluntarily quit the MISR programme and joined other institutions.
(b) Ten members of teaching staff have left MISR due specifically to the acrimonious relationship with the Director. Some of these had 5 year contracts and decided to leave at the beginning of their contracts. One of the recent cases includes an instructor who has left MISR on malicious grounds after MISR, without copying in the affected instructor, wrote to Makerere University to withdraw its support and recommendation of a 5 year contract.
(c) Ten support staff (cleaners, messengers, drivers and secretaries) who rebelled against mistreatment by the administration (such as being referred to as ‘dogs’ and denied working tools so that they don’t work and consequently get fired) and the plan to replace them with a private firm, have been unceremoniously expelled (7 of them) or involuntarily transferred to other departments within Makerere (3 of them). These acts, wrote the Makerere Branch Secretary of NUEI (a trade union to which the MISR support staff appealed) in his April 13th 2016 letter to Prof Mamdani, “are not acceptable under the employment act and inhuman in the face of humanity.”
(3) The values inculcated by MISR money are not those of solidarity, social engagement, intellectual independence, equity and social justice that you have fought for in your life. Through its funding and administrative model, MISR is inclined to produce scholars that are taciturn, self-advancing and well–adjusted to injustice.
It is against this background that we ask you to decline the invitation to give a talk at the Makerere Institute of Social Research. We are afraid that your name will be used to legitimize the gross acts of oppression taking place at the Institute. This won’t be your first time. In 2003, following the US invasion of Iraq, you declined, at the eleventh hour, the invitation to give a paper on “Remaking Law in Africa” in the UK. “I am afraid,” you wrote to the organisers “I cannot simply bring myself to attend these conferences” amid the “current assault and massacre of law, justice and humanity by the most rapacious imperial power on earth.”
Today we are asking you to show the same spirit to a very tyrannical administrator on the continent’s academic circles!
Signatories:
1. Sabatho Nyamsenda (Tanzania)
2. Noosim Naimasiah (Kenya)
3. Charles Prempeh (Ghana)
4. Mahir Balunywa (Uganda)
5. Semeneh Ayalew (Ethiopia)
6. Bernard Baha (Tanzania)
7. Philip Oketcho (Uganda)
