By Bob Kisiki
For five days running, Makerere University and its affiliate, Makerere University Business School, popularly known as MUBS, held graduation events last week.
It was jubilation galore all over, for it is a season many look forward to, both students and their parents, as well as some of their lecturers.
After three/four/up to six years for some, of arduous work, it is fitting that one celebrates one’s graduation.
For the parent, it is great relief. One person off the fees and other related expenditures list, even if it should be just for a while.
But now spare a thought for that unique parent who, having done all they could to find money to take their child through school, all the way from kindergarten, through painful primary and severe secondary, up to the tempestuous tertiary level, just as they gear up for their child’s graduation, bang! They realise the child is not graduating!
I will tell you a real life story by way of illustrating this ugly scenario. It happened when I worked at Makerere University. There was this boy; he was a student of law. It is actually at Law School that he saw a girl; two years below his cohort. They hit it off and, unlike others who just sought to play about with each other, these ones decided they would formalise their relationship. So the girl said she was talking to her parents to have him hosted as their potential son-in-law. It is one long, sad tale, but after dating for a year and handing the girl lots of money in the process, ostensibly to help her family prepare for the kwanjula, she disappeared, together with his hope of ever completing his education because, you will not believe it, he could have been using his tuition money to fund the relationship!
That, without letting his parents into it. Being a finalist, and afraid to tell his family, he faked preps for graduation, even asking his parents to come to Kampala for the event, then he disappeared.
What does this tell us? Many parents take their [parenting] hands off their children the moment they [the children] go to university. They imagine that there is a magic line children jump over, very much like the equator, that suddenly makes them mature, responsible and independent, simply because they have passed their A’level examinations and crossed over to tertiary level. They do not ask them what is going on in their lives; they do not remind them of the standards by which they raised them; they let the dictates of youth, the ways of the university and the influences of the day take charge.
University is a tumultuous place and time. An 18-year-old cannot be expected to navigate its turbulent waters without the ever-present risk of drowning.
At university, lecturers do not police students around. Just like some parents who assume that university students can ‘handle’, the lecturers too presume they are dealing with mature people who can separate good from bad. They forget that just months ago, these were the very people their teachers were spoon-feeding in class, herding on the campus and babying in their free time. So when did they mutate into the adults you all take them to be?
The writer is a parenting counsellor and teacher
