Over 80 staff jobs up for grabs at Makerere

Makerere University is in the process of hiring at least 80 teaching and non-teaching staff for various colleges and schools.

According to the advert Daily Monitor has seen, the university is hiring 46 academic staff (24 assistant lecturers and 22 lecturers).

According to the qualifications, one should be a PhD holder and below the age of 55. He or she should also possess master’s and bachelors degrees in the listed fields.

The university is slated to hire three directors for Jinja campus, graduate research training and Makerere University Institute of Social Research (MISR). These should be PhD holders at the rank of professor and associate professor.

The institution that just celebrated its 100 years in existence is also slated to hire technical assistants (5), librarians (5), directors (3), legal officers (2), Custodians (2), and principal technicians (2), among others.

Mass recruitment at the institution comes a few months after more than 17 senior teaching staff and non-teaching staff resigned over various reasons.

The renowned Prof Mahmood Mamdani, the former MISR director, also resigned from the institution, where he had served for 13 years. 

The teaching staff tasked the university to recruit more staff to cover the gap.

In an interview with Daily Monitor yesterday, the vice chancellor, Prof Barnabas Nawangwe, said the university is trying to replace staff who have since retired from the institution. 

“We are replacing people who have reached retirement or resigned. The majority of them are people who have attained the retirement age,” Prof Nawangwe said yesterday.

Meanwhile, the chairperson of Makerere University Academic Staff (MUASA), Mr Robert Kakuru, said whereas it is good to replace staff who have left, management should also consider promoting staff internally.

“We still have many staff gaps at the institution which we think management should handle with urgency. The recruitment should also be balanced with internal promotion of staff. This has led to low morale among staff,” Mr Kakuru said.

He asked management to fill top managerial positions that are still having people in acting positions for long. He said without the required top managers in these offices, their functions are hard to execute.

Accusations
Makerere University staff have on several occasions tasked management to recruit substantive people in managerial positions such as human resource director, academic staff and deputy vice chancellor finance and administration.

Management has also been accused of failing to promote staff to the rank of senior lecturers and professors yet they qualify, with the top managers attributing the delays to scarcity of resources.