It is now more than a month since President Yoweri Museveni
shut down Makerere University in Kampala. The closure was over academic staff
abandoning teaching and giving the government an ultimatum: Pay us our unpaid
arrears or we will not return to work.
The academic staff members are not striking over salaries –
which they had been paid in full. Instead, their strike was over some strange
thing called “incentives”; amalgamated allowances for extra work like teaching
in the evening or on weekends or having a very large class with many student
scripts to mark.
Apparently, the university’s top management organ; the
University Council, adopted paying the incentives without a proper budget. If
it had budgeted, it would have realized that the incentives scheme was neither
affordable nor sustainable as it is supposed to be paid out of Makerere
University’s internally generated revenue and cost Shs3.7 billion per month or
Shs43 billion a year.
The incentives scheme was created in 2013. The first result
was that 81% of the university’s total revenue began going to pay wages alone.
As a result, Makerere is unable to invest in many other activities that enhance
education like computers, books, laboratory equipment, new buildings, chairs,
desks etc.
Under scheme, Makerere lecturers appear to be milking the
university’s ability to serve the broader interests of higher education. They
have reduced the university it into their ATM.
It should be noted that even without incentives, the
government pays 76.6% of the lecturers’ salaries while the university
contributes 23.4% from its revenues.
Secondly, from 2013 up to early this year, Makerere was only
able to pay these incentives to its lecturers at the cost of not paying other
suppliers of goods and services.
By September 2016, the university had accumulated debt of
Shs130 billion. Thus payment for lecturers has dragged the university to near
bankruptcy.
The lecturers strike at Makerere is also could be seen as
unfair for another reason. Currently, the university has total enrollment of
39,546 students of whom only 6,324 are sponsored by government. This means that
33,222 students are self-sponsored i.e. their parents, guardians or themselves
pay fees from which 23.4% of lecturers’ salaries are paid. To refuse to teach
when privately sponsored students constitute 84% of the total student
population is unfair.
But there is a broader point to be made from the Makerere
University strike and closure saga. The age of “democracy” (or mobocracy) is
dragging Africa along a slippery slope of fiscal suicide. Across this vast
continent, many governments, in the face of electoral competition, make
promises to increase wages of public sector employees beyond what is advisable
under prudent fiscal management. This problem is most acute in countries where
the ruling party faces a risk of losing elections.
In Kenya, Ghana, Zambia, Ivory Coast and Senegal, public
sector wages are now between 45% and 55% of the budget against a prudentially
recommended ceiling of 30%.
Zambia and Kenya have recently failed to pay their public
sector employees. Consequently they have been forced to borrow from abroad to
meet public sector wage obligations at home.
This problem is slowly creeping into Uganda whose fiscal
regime on public sector wages (they take only 25.4% of the budget) has been
very prudent. However, if Uganda seeks to placate the interests of every
powerful group with big wage hikes, this prudence will collapse.
And we seem headed into that direction.
In 2013, the Makerere University incentives scheme started
when the lecturers went on strike, demanding a salary increase of 100%. In a
meeting with Museveni, the president promised that government would meet this
demand within two years. Under this promise, a professor would earn Shs15
million per month. But the Ministry of Finance bluntly told the lecturers that
it could not meet the President’s promise. That is how the University Council
reacted by increasing wages of academic staff by 70%. When the University
Council passed that resolution, the university bursar resigned in protest. He
told them the pay scheme was not sustainable. When a new bursar was appointed,
he too protested payment of the incentives. He explained that the university
cannot afford them and stopped paying them.
Yet strikes by Makerere academic staff are not new. It has
been the major instrument they have used to force government to increase their
pay since 1987. Back then, they were demanding a “living wage”. I was a student
at Makerere in 1995 when lecturers went again on strike over salaries. They
have done this consistently since. In order to understand the problems of pay
at Makerere, we shall ask and answer a number of critical questions to shade
light on the problem.
Are Makerere lecturers poorly paid? How do we judge this? We
shall compare their wages with those of other lecturers in private universities
in Uganda. We shall also compare with lecturers in public universities in
Kenya, Tanzania and Rwanda. We shall also compare with average wages paid in
the civil service and the private sector in Uganda. Finally we shall even
stretch ourselves and compare with lecturers in the United States, the world’s richest
nation.
Secondly, has government been insensitive to the salary
interests of lecturers? We shall look at the trends in their wages over the
last 25 years. We shall look at Uganda’s growing revenue and growing budget to
see how lecturers have performed in terms of their share of our nation’s ever
growing pie.
Uganda government budget for 1995/96 was Shs1.014 trillion
which, when adjusted to inflation, comes to Shs3.5 trillion in 2015 prices.
Total government revenue in 1995/96 was Shs627 billion (Shs2.172 trillion in
2015 prices). Uganda’s revenues and budget have grown immensely over the last
20 years to Shs13.5 trillion and Shs21 trillion respectively. How have Makerere
lecturers faired?
Contrary to claims by some of the lecturers, the government
has consistently increased their wages at a rate faster than the growth in
national revenue and the budget.
To demonstrate this, I have included population growth in my
calculations by using per capita revenue (total tax revenue divided by the
population) and per capita spending (total government budget divided by total
population).
In 1995, Uganda had a population of 20.78 million. In that
year, per capita revenue was Shs30,173 or Shs104,550 in 2015 prices and per
capita spending was Shs48,796 or Shs169,000 in 2015 prices.
Today, total government revenue is Shs13.5 trillion and a
budget of Shs21 trillion for a population of 40 million. This gives us per
capita revenue of Shs337,000 and per capital spending of Shs525,000. We can now
compare the rate of increase in lecturers’ wages against rate of growth of
Uganda’s per capita revenue and per capita spending.
In 1987/88, the year of currency reform, and the year when
Makerere lecturers went on strike for the first time under the Museveni
administration, the salary of a professor at Makerere was Shs4,355 which, when
adjusted to inflation, comes to Shs272,928. By 1990, this salary had increased
to Shs13,066 which, when adjusted to inflation comes to Shs930,000 – a 241%
increase in real terms over three years. The salaries of all other categories
of lecturers increased at an even higher rate as Table 1 below shows.
In 1995/96 the salary of a professor was Shs447,893. When
adjusted to inflation, it comes to Shs1.55 million in 2015 prices. In 2016, the
salary of a professor before incentives is Shs8.03 million. This means that
since Museveni came to power, the earnings of a professor at Makerere have
increased by 2800% in real terms (meaning after adjusting for inflation) from
Shs 272,928 to Shs8.03 million. Even in relative terms i.e. as a ratio to
government per capital revenue and per capita spending, there has been great
increase in lecturers’ pay.
For example, in 1995/96, a professor’s salary was 15 times
the per capita revenue and 9.2 times of per capita spending at the time. Today
Shs8.03 million (before incentives) is 24 times the per capita revenue and 15.3
times the per capita spending of Uganda. With incentives a professor’s salary
is about Shs10.5 million i.e. 31 times per capita revenue and 20 times per
capita spending as Table 4 shows. Across the board, salaries of lecturers in
all categories at Makerere have increased significantly. See Tables 1 and 2.
In fact as Table 1 demonstrates, the last three years have
seen an unprecedented increase in the salaries of lecturers at Makerere. Since
2013/14 financial year, the salary of a professor and by extension all other
categories of lecturers have witnessed growth of not less than 152% in three
years. Table 3 shows both the nominal (currency denominated Shillings) and the
real (after adjustment to inflation) percentage increase in the salaries of all
categories of lecturers since 1995.
This brings us to the question of whether Makerere lecturers
are poorly paid. I have done a survey in private universities and the average
salary of a professor is Shs5 million against Makerere’s Shs8.03 million
(sciences) and Shs7.5 million (humanities). Secondly, lecturers in private
universities have more workload than counterparts at Uganda’s public universities.
Yet lecturers at private universities are not striking for pay.
Finally I checked with PriceWaterHouse Coopers, the firm
that does annual studies on the relative wages in most companies and
organisations in Uganda. Except for top and senior executives of large private
firms and a few government agencies, lecturers in public universities in Uganda
are among the most highly paid people in this country.
Therefore, it is not pay but the incentive structure created
by electoral politics that makes Makerere lecturers seek to blackmail
government to constantly increase their pay.
Indeed, if you get total value of incentives (Shs 3.7
billion per month) and divide it by the total number of academic staff (1,461),
each one of them would on average get an extra pay of Shs 2.5m. But this money
is not paid put pro rata. Table 2 shows the amount of money each category of
lecturers gets as “incentives”.
Once you include the incentives, it comes to more than
double what lecturers in private universities are paid. And it does not include
the fact that many lecturers at Makerere, especially professors and associate
professors, get free accommodation whose market value can be equal to their
salaries i.e. they live in houses which, if they rented them, would cost $2,500
(Shs 9 million) per month.
I have researched universities in the region and still
Uganda government pays almost the same wages as these countries. Indeed, in
order to compare like for like, I have converted the wages of lecturers in
Kenya, Tanzania and Rwanda into US dollars. But to make it even more
understandable, I had adjusted these wages to Purchasing Power Parity in order
to get the actual value of this dollar denominated wage. And more than that, I
have also correlated it to the per capita income and per capita spending of
each of these nations and converted them to PPP. See Table 5.
As Table 5 shows, Uganda pays her lecturers a higher share
of her per capita income and per capita spending than Tanzania and Kenya, and
almost draws with Rwanda. We can also compare Makerere’s pay with average pay
for professors in the United States, a country with a per capita income 27
times that of Uganda.
Table 6 shows the average salaries of US lecturers from
professors downwards. While the average wage of a tenured professor in America
is $95,224 that of his counterpart at Makerere University is $26,689. Now while
this looks 3.5 times less, we need to adjust Ugandan wages to PPP in order to
reflect their actual purchasing power relative to the dollar. The salary of a
professor at Makerere when adjusted to Purchasing Power Parity comes to
$87,540. Effectively, Makerere, in a country with a per capita income of $2003
in PPP pays its lecturers almost the same money as an average professor in USA,
with a per capita income of $56,000, earns.
These facts are often ignored and it has become increasingly
clear to me that public policy debates in Uganda tend to reflect a toxic
combination of high emotion and little knowledge. In fact, a culture has grown
and consolidated in Uganda’s public debate that is hostile to facts, that
rejects reference to scientifically generated and unbiased data in favour of
feelings. However, we should remember that righteous anger is never a basis for
good policy.
This lesson sunk into me over time as I began to take
research seriously. When governments make policy in response to public anger it
is often bad policy. Many times when I have taken a position based on my
intuitive feelings, and then gone back and subjected them to a scientific analysis,
I have found my intuition wrong. This realisation made me feel good because it
has consistently released me from partisan anger. And once I was no longer
angry, I was no longer committed to reaching the conclusion that righteous
anger demands – I am virtuous and government officials are evil.
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amwenda@independent.co.ug
****
editor@independent.co.ug
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