By Umaru Fofana
Does anyone care about what students in this country, especially at Fourah Bay College, suffer in their day-to-day life on campus? I ask not because I elicit an answer from you. I know the answer. It is a big NO! And these students go through quite a lot.
When they go on strike because of something they are not pleased with, they lose precious class hours and even stand the danger of losing their place in college. When the junior staff withhold their cleaning or clerical duty the students suffer. When the academic staff refuse to teach the students bear the consequence.
When the hostels are decaying and smelly the students have to lie in them. When the toilets are decked with human excreta the students suffer the agony and contract disease. When the taps run dry which happens more often than not these same students are forced to resort to drinking undrinkable water and the result is stark.
When students protest over their appalling conditions they are rusticated. When female students are sexually harassed by some lecturers, they suffer in agony. If they complain they become double victims. In all of this they do not get redress. In all of this no one seems to care for the plight of the students.
Agreed that these students sometimes go overboard and stupidity gets the better of them but it is right to say that even by his own reckoning one of the most pacifist people of our time, Martin Luther King Jr says: “violence is the voice of the unheard”. Stupidity can also be.
The deprivation students at FBC suffer is not a new phenomenon. Such is how bad it was in the 1970s and 1980s that when the National Provisional Ruling Council took over in the 1990s, they instituted the Professor Kwame Commission of Inquiry. It laid much of the blame for the problems at the college on the trampling on the rights of students. I am not aware of the implementation of any of the recommendations contained in that Kwame report. In the last several weeks lasting the recent strike action by lecturers, I have searched all over the place for the commission’s report without trace.
And the decay does not end there: a few metres from the taxi drop-off point at Fourah Bay College stands a building that is very interesting. It is the office of the college’s estate department. Even the estate department is in need of repairs if not a complete overhaul. It explains why the hostels and classrooms are in such a dilapidated state. With all arms open in anticipation of the largesse promised by the Arab Bank for African Development.
That money is to be spent entirely on infrastructure. Nothing on research. During its celebration recently of the 186 anniversary of the college, speaker after speaker lamented over the current spate of collapse of Fourah Bay College. Even if tinged with some expression of optimism even if based on hope alone. Then Dr Dalton Faulker, the acting Planning Director of the University of Sierra Leone told me that it was only when the college had the facilities that it could live anywhere near its past glory. “They are not there! There is nothing” the former science lecturer told me. “The fundamentals and the environment must be there” he went on. “How can I do my research” he asked, rhetorically.
It probably makes a lot of sense that in the interest of the future development of students, funding be sought to provide for more research and equipment especially for the study of science and technology. Science is the way to go if our nation is to prosper. And I mean this beyond grandstanding.
Throughout this week the BBC is holding a huge Science Festival at the Makarere University in Kampala, Uganda. Among other things it is showcasing the import and impact of science on Africa and how far the continent has come to make itself relevant in this area, in this day and age of a boom in science and technology elsewhere in the world.
It could not have come at a worse time for the study of science in Sierra Leone. Ironically, just when the ministry of education was renamed Ministry of Education, Science and Technology some ten or more years ago, the study of science took a turn for the worse in a country which used to be among the premiers and still boasts of a long list of scientists who have shown the world their talent. Professor Aiah Kpakima and his worldwide acclaim in research on river blindness immediately come to mind. The former Principal of the University of Sierra Leone did not have his contract extended for some apparent political reasons. But that is for another day. Prof Monty Jones, the man who fed and still does feed the world with his fast growing New Rice for Africa (NERICA).
Today, schools throughout the country which have a real science laboratory can be counted on the fingers. In some schools, the laboratories have become lavatories. A college of science and technology started by then minister of education, science and technology, Dr Alpha Wurie, at Hill Station is dying with nothing good seen in it by the current administration.
It is perhaps a microcosm of the general situation of things at FBC. For nearly two decades the college did not produce a graduate in physics. Now, a group of students in the electrical and electronic department at the college are on the verge of losing out of graduating in April by no fault of theirs. And not for the first time. The over 40 students wrote their dissertation in good time and their supervisor, according them and investigations so far, frustrated them by not having time to mark their end-of-course work. As a consequence: they may have to wait until next year to graduate.
Another batch of students in their same situation last year was forced to wait until this year, to graduate. They have written to the Ombudsman. Did you ask why the Ombudsman? Because the college administration has no mechanism for redress for aggrieved students. When their grievances tip over and they take on the lecturer, they are taken to a kangaroo disciplinary committee dominated by lecturers who protect themselves against “student arrogance”. The real arrogant and disrespectful students hardly receive any punishment for their unruly behaviour because they have connections with people in government. People in government to whom some of these lecturers and college administrators have sold their souls for reasons that range from the bizarre to the ridiculous.
As a students’ union leader at FBC in the mid 1990s, I used to question how come I would be the sole student representative in discussing matters of alleged student indiscipline when over a dozen representatives of the administration would all be baying for the blood of the students. No justice! Plain and simple!
Such trends, if not arrested, could result in what it resulted in when in the 1970s students’ rights were trampled upon without redress for simply expressing their constitutional rights.
The college administration hardly gets audited. Where it does, my sources say they paper over the cracks. Student fees were increased this academic year by over 100 percent. Yet what are the facilities? Some pay for computer science and they leave without ever having touched a computer. Do I sound angry? Yes I do. And yes I am angry at this awful state of affairs. Because I am sick and tired of students being suppressed with nowhere to seek redress from in a society where almost everything about justice is decaying, as decadence itself thrives.
