My experience with The Makererean

Sometime back, I contributed to an article, “The death of The Makererean”. It gave an insight into the pertinent issues that brought down The Makererean. As a journalist, I shared the story with a fellow journalist who remarked that it was opinionated. I didn’t appreciate the idea or refute it. I would like to give some bit of the experience I had with the university newspaper.
When I joined Makerere University, it was surprising to learn that it didn’t produce its own regular newspaper. In January 2007, the notice boards were full of notices inviting mass communication students to start contributing articles for publication. Immediately, I sent the articles that I had been compiling hoping they could be used in forthcoming editions.
The Makererean supposedly a bi-monthly publication appeared once in four months. Worse still, it was poorly edited, improperly designed and not well distributed to the students.
I contacted a number of ambitious journalists and sloped to the newspaper’s Media Flower offices based at Wandegeya to meet the editors. That walk marked the start of daily trek to and from the office coupled by numerous bouncing at the locked door and strenuous sitting on computers to write and edit stories.
I lost a flash disk during hectic days, it really pained me since it was the first I had ever had trough partnership with my roommate. It was a priced possession.
One month down the road, we had not produced a single issue. The management of the Media Flower kept complaining about lack of a page layer. I brought a Rwandese journalist to do it. There was no money so, he couldn’t start.
I used to wonder who Media Flower is yet the paper is run by the guild. I later came to realise that Media Flower had been contracted by the guild to run the paper. Financial constraints always clumped down any move we made.
We gave up and concentrated on our course works and tests. Some of our fellow journalists alleged that we were on strike. It appeared like we were. It was until they called one evening and informed me they had published an issue.
The following day I went there before lectures to get myself the cream of publication. Little did I know that the issue was nothing to take pride in. We met a lot of criticism, worse of all from two lecturers to whom I had gone to deliver some issues. They advised me to get something else to do. (I noted this with a lot of concern and particularly now as I am singing dirges for the fallen newspaper). I left the office feeling like a rain-beaten chicken.
My fellow colleagues downplayed the lecturers’ remarks and blamed them for lack of concern about the paper and failure to offer an alternative training ground for us. Still, we went ahead to make plans for the next issues.
We embarked on the next issue with vigour and ‘will-be-better- this- time’ attitude.
However we were to be disappointed by losing a lot of our work to computer viruses. Owing to this an issue was hard to come by.
With undying zeal we pushed on to make up for the lost articles. We informed the Makerere University Mass Communication Student Association (MUMSA) of our plan.
However they made un-fulfilled promises of consolidating our plans and harnessing the paper into a strong campus newspaper.
Finally one day after I had thrown in the towel, I casually dropped at the Media Flower offices only to find someone doing the page layout. My colleague and I quickly swung into action .We did some editing.
By the time we left we had not taken lunch and had to run up the hill to catch up with a lecture at 3pm.
The printing took a painful two weeks. By the time I was called to collect the paper and aid in distribution, I had lost the hope that it would see the light of the day.
Exams were fast approaching. I had invested a lot of time with nothing much to show for it. To add salt to the injury, I was receiving poor marks in my course works. I had a lot of backlog of academic work to revise. To cover up I ended sleeping for four hours. I felt like regretting it all.
It is with these sad memories that I teamed up with a colleague to dissect the reason why the newspaper is a bad story for the prestigious and the oldest university in East and Central Africa, inaptly now referred to as the Harvard of Africa.
It’s saddening that the paper has been dead for one academic year now and the future looks dim. Despite this, I pay my regards to MUMSA for coming up with www.theivorypost.com, an online newspaper as an alternative.
Macharia Muriuki