Makerere to do away with over 70 chronic absentees.

SUMMARY:

• According to Prof Barnabas, the headcount followed numerous complaints from students and stakeholders about poor service delivery in some university departments.

Makerere University is set to dismiss at least 70 teaching and non-teaching if they fail to explaim to the management why they were not found on duty during a headcount.

According to a few reliable sources at the university, a number of staff were not found in their offices when officials from the Appointments Board conducted the head count in January, adding that these staff face disciplinary action as prescribed in the University Human Resource Manual.

In a February 18 letter to one of the affected top staff in the Department of the Academic Registrar (names withheld), the vice chancellor, Prof Barnabas Nawangwe tasks him to show cause why disciplinary action should not be taken against him.

“Management has further received information that this absenteeism and reporting late to work is your common practice …. hence tarnishing the good image of the university,” Prof Nawangwe said in the letter

According to Prof Barnabas, the headcount followed numerous complaints from students and stakeholders about poor service delivery in some university departments.

“Our clients and stakeholders were saying that some offices were permanently closed so we decided to find out whether these staff were on ground or not. The report from the appointments board indicated that the staff did not turn up for duty that day and there was no genuine communication,” Prof Nawangwe said.

He indicated that over 71 per cent of the affected staff are from the office of the Academic Registrar that yielded the majority of the complaints.

However, Mr Bennet Magara, the chairperson of Makerere University Administrative Staff Association, pointed at a few loopholes with this report and said that not all the listed staff were absent, because some staff report to their daily duty stations at college and sometimes do not report to the centre.

 “The headcount was a genuine one but the staff whom I have seen with letters are those with an office at the centre (academic registrar’s office) but deployed at colleges. These should have missed the headcount,” he  said.