On 2 November, the Secretary of the Pharmaceutical Society of Uganda signed a letter to the Vice Chancellor of Victoria University.
Its instruction to the university was blunt: upon receipt, immediately halt the teaching, assessment and clinical placement of every Bachelor of Pharmacy student beyond an approved intake of fifty. Within seven days, submit a signed list of exactly fifty students to be kept and more than three hundred to be put "on hold."
Fail to comply, and the programme will be de-recognised without further notice, its graduates barred from the pre-registration examinations that stand between a degree and a licence.
The letter was copied to two Cabinet ministers, two Permanent Secretaries, two parliamentary committees, the Executive Director of the National Council for Higher Education, the Uganda Law Society, the entire membership of the Society and the national pharmacy students' association.
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That distribution list is not the mark of a regulator trying to solve a problem quietly with a partner. It is the mark of a regulator building a public case.
Let us concede what must be conceded
PSU has a statutory mandate to supervise the training of pharmacists. Admission quotas exist for a reason: a laboratory bench built for fifty students does not become adequate for three hundred because a university wishes it so. Patient safety is not a slogan. A university that enrols far beyond its approved number owes the regulator, and the public, a serious account of how those students are being taught, by whom, and where they will do their clinical hours.
Victoria University must give that account, and nobody who cares about the profession should pretend otherwise.
But the question this letter raises is not whether quotas matter. It is what a regulator does when it finds them breached. And on that question, PSU's own letter convicts it.
The regulator that slept, then shouted
Buried in paragraph (c) is an admission the Society seems not to have noticed it was making. Victoria University applied in August 2025 to raise its quota from fifty to 250. Under the Society's own memorandum with NCHE, that application was supposed to trigger a joint NCHE-PSU inspection before any decision.
The letter states plainly that this inspection "has not been done to date." Fifteen months later, the regulators have not visited the facilities they are now describing as inadequate for the numbers in them.
Whose failure is that? The university submitted its request and followed it up in writing. The regulatory machinery did not move. PSU's answer to its own system's paralysis is to punish the university that waited for it, and the students who enrolled in good faith while it waited. "A pending application is not an approval," the letter says. True. But a pending inspection is not an excuse for the inspectors, either.
Worse, the letter's second page reveals that the Society did inspect the university in April 2026 and sat through a presentation showing nearly 900 students enrolled across eleven intakes. It knew the numbers seven months ago.
If those numbers were an emergency for patient safety, the emergency began in April, not on 2 November, and the proportionate response then was to fast-track the joint inspection, not to wait until the new academic year had begun and then demand that teaching stop mid-stream.
Compliance does not precede discussion. Discussion is how compliance happens.
The letter closes with a line that should be studied in every school of public administration on the continent: "compliance must precede discussion." That is regulation turned upside down. Everywhere pharmacy education is taken seriously, accreditation works the other way round. Regulators and universities discuss first, because discussion is the only mechanism by which a programme ever comes into compliance.
In the United States, the accrediting council for pharmacy education works through graded findings: a programme is accredited, accredited with notice, placed on probation, and only at the end of a documented path of unmet conditions is accreditation withdrawn, and even then with a mandatory teach-out so that enrolled students are not left stranded.
In the United Kingdom, the regulator attaches conditions to a school's accreditation, sets improvement timelines and returns to verify them. Across these systems the principle is the same: the student who is already in the lecture hall is not a bargaining chip. The sanction falls on the institution's future intake, not on the learner's present education.
PSU's letter holds up Malaysia, Ghana and South Africa as models of countries that grew their pharmacy sectors by enforcing standards. It is right to. But those countries grew by building inspection capacity, issuing conditional approvals and setting remediation deadlines, not by ordering universities to freeze hundreds of students in a single week while the regulator's own inspection sat undone.
A tone that should embarrass the office
Then there is the manner of it. A statutory regulator writing on an accreditation matter chose to devote a paragraph to challenging a university to make its students physically demonstrate the position of the acetate group on the benzene ring of aspirin.
It chose to spend a full page rebutting a post on X, sentence by sentence, while conceding it did not know whether the account was even genuine. It chose to describe a chartered university's admissions as "fraud on foreign and local parents" in a letter copied to Parliament.
None of this is regulation. It is point-scoring, and it is being done on official letterhead with the full weight of a statutory office behind it. Professional bodies hold their authority in trust for the public. When that authority is spent on rhetorical flourishes and public humiliation rather than on the dull work of inspection and remediation, the trust is being spent too.
The irony the Society cannot escape
There is one more fact that makes this letter extraordinary. The pharmacy programme PSU now threatens to de-recognise was established at Victoria University by the very person who signed the letter, during his tenure as Dean of the Faculty of Health Sciences there. He recruited its founding staff. He pronounced it among the best in the country.
That history does not disqualify him from regulating his former employer. But it does mean that few people in Uganda know the programme's facilities, its staffing and its gaps better than he does. That knowledge is an asset, and it should have been deployed in a remediation plan, not in an ultimatum. A regulator who once built the house is uniquely placed to say which walls need strengthening. He is poorly placed to be the one calling for the bulldozer.
What a serious regulator would do this week
The letter says PSU is "ready" to conduct the joint inspection the moment NCHE confirms availability. Good. Then the Society should name the date, publicly, and press NCHE to honour it within thirty days. It should audit the university's facilities, staffing and clinical sites against the 250 it says it is willing to approve, and tell the university precisely what is missing.
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It should issue conditional recognition with milestones: lecturer-to-student ratios by a set date, additional laboratory capacity by another, confirmed internship placements by a third. It should guarantee a teach-out for every student already enrolled, so that no young Ugandan who registered in good faith is left holding a degree nobody will license.
And it should sit down with NCHE and resolve, once and for all, the contradiction between a 2023 directive mandating a single annual intake and a sector in which multiple intakes have plainly been operating in the open for three years.
Victoria University, for its part, must open its doors, its registers and its staffing files without reservation. If the numbers cannot be defended, the university must say so and agree a path to bring them down. Chartered status is a responsibility, not a shield.
Measure twice, cut once
PSU ends its letter with the words "Health first." Nobody disagrees. But health is not served by a regulator that waits fifteen months, then demands a seven-day amputation. It is served by the slow, unglamorous labour of inspecting, advising, conditioning and verifying, the labour that every mature pharmacy regulator in the world has learned to do.
Regulation is a scaffold. It holds an institution up while the building is made sound. It is not a wrecking ball, and the hundreds of students sitting in a lecture hall in Kampala this week deserve a regulator that understands the difference.
The writer is a journalist covering education and health policy in Uganda.
