I felt sad the other day reading a comment from one of the students either from Poly or Chanco. His comment appeared under the article that was talking about students from the two institutions having stolen money from a bank in Malawi. In a nutshell what he said was that the bank was not being fair to them owing to the fact that their colleges were closed already. He said the issue with the bank was just going to make things more complicated for them.
The comment was so emotional; you could tell that behind it there was a broken and helpless person.
Now, the talk in town is that the students are suffering like this because their lecturers led by Jessie Kabwila Kapasula are fighting for Academic Freedom. But are the lectures really fighting for Academic freedom? In this article I contend that they are not and my attempt is not to defend government but to begin to put the fight for Academic Freedom into the right perspective as it is an issue that concerns us all.
The battle that the lecturers are having thus far indicates that they are fighting:
- 1. Against Bingu wa Munthalika’s presidency
- 2. Against the Lomwe Grouping
- 3. To protect Blessings Chisinga’s ego
- 4. To show off
And the courts have shown that what is popular is what is just for them and not necessarily what is just.
There is nothing like fighting for Academic Freedom from them as we should have had it in Malawi.
Considering that what started all this is the IG of police questioning Chisinga over a lesson he had given to his students, an action that was deemed as a violation of Academic Freedom by the lecturers. To them Academic Freedom died in Malawi at the point when the IG questioned Chisinga.
If that was the case then logically speaking, it therefore follows that since the perpetrator is the IG, it should have been the IG that was sued. A thing none of them has done so far?
Alternatively, the lecturers should have gone to the constitutional court for a judicial review of the Academic Freedom, a thing that has not happened up to now.
Before we look what has happened so far, that shows that there is really no academic freedom fight in Malawi, let us ask ourselves another question: Looking at the way the battle is going, how will victory for the battle of Academic Freedom look like?
As we are talking the lecturers have registered some success in court and have managed to solicit some help from abroad including some from Germany and Indiana in the USA. It comes as no surprise that they have managed to get that support from these places because Blessings and Jessie went to do their PhD’s at these two places respectively.
The lectures have also managed to organize a peaceful demonstration on the matter. They also have had numerous public engagements through the local and international media.
To crown it all recently Jessie Kabwira Kapasula told Capital FM radio that there is no definition for Academic Freedom and that it needs not to be defined. The fact that it is in the constitution is enough, no questions asked.
What is mind boggling about that is, if Jessie does not know what Academic Freedom is since there is no definition, what is she fighting for then? What is it that she claims to have been violated by the IG? If it is to sue him, what is she going to sue him for? The difficult one to answer would be, if that is the case, what is ‘not’ Academic Freedom? What other violation of human rights would qualify as no violation of Academic Freedom?
With that in the background, think about the courts, they have been able to pass judgment in favor of lecturers to cases that are offshoots of what is supposed to be a case for Academic Freedom. The lecturers are boycotting classes and have done everything that contravene their conditions of service at the pretext of fighting for something that we are finding out now from Jessie that it is an illusion of some kind and the courts have said that is okay.
What I see with our courts about this is that they are being democratic as in being unrestricted, if we are to use an elegant term to describe what they are doing. They are not being just. They are going with what is popular and have lost all the logic that should accompany court proceedings.
This make the courts lose credibility of which in itself is a danger to Academic Freedom as we would want to fight for it when sanity returns to Malawi. If courts have already passed judgment from without, where will that court find the clout to actually legally define it for what it should be? How will the court deduce that a case brought before it does not qualify as a case of Academic Freedom violation?
In all this the people that are suffering and will suffer are the students whose voice and cries can faintly be heard in the background and all efforts even through the courts are being taken to suppress it. If we are going to window dress the problem by serenading Chisinga and Jessie to their egos with our fight, we are doing nothing but to keep the problem yet for another day. It will come back to us in a nasty way as we would have damaged it some more by fighting the Chisinga battle now thinking that we are fighting for Academic Freedom.
