By Hajaratu Kalokoh
The University of Sierra Leone (USL) has conferred degree and academic awards on over 3,000 students for the 2018/2019 academic year.
The ceremony with the theme “Education towards Entrepreneurship” took place on Saturday 22 February at the National Stadium in Freetown.
The graduands were from all three constituent colleges – Fourah Bay College (FBC), Institute of Public Administration and Management (IPAM) and College of Medicine and Allied Health Sciences (COMAHS).
A total number of 3,076 degrees were conferred: 8 Doctorate degrees, 263 Master’s degrees and 2,805 first degrees.
Chancellor of the university, President Julius Maada Bio urged students to focus on innovation and entrepreneurship to reduce the scramble for readymade jobs.
“We can roast locally grown Arabica coffee to various tastes and packages and label those as organic products from the rainforest of Sierra Leone,” he said.
He went on: “When marketed accordingly, it will create jobs, and create wealth for the entrepreneurs in Sierra Leone. Whatever efficient technologies you see, whether adaptive or disruptive, your objective is clear – to create and pursue goals that others are not seeing or can see but have not taken advantage of.”
University Pro-Chancellor, Professor Hector G Morgan noted during his welcome address that students should practice integrity with a mixture of decent principles.
“Let us try a pictorial analogy of this integration, consider the jigsaw puzzle game. It starts with a finite number of differently shaped pieces of a picture. The pieces are our moral precepts. To reconstruct the picture using the pieces, you must sort out and link pieces which fit in several ways,” he said.
“In the same way, we perceive a person as having integrity when his /her interaction with others, demonstrate a successfully developed set of balanced integrated moral values”, Prof Morgan went on.
“We are familiar with various ways in which people who…lack integrity behave e.g. [through] embezzlement of state funds and assets; various manifestations of examination malpractices by students and staff involving mainly sex and money; academic fraud through falsification of academic credentials and procuring open market degree certificate; gross misuse and abuse of state power by those who have access and control of it, the list is painfully long” he lamented.
Most of the 3,076 graduates will join thousands of others to scramble for the very few available jobs.
Timothy Thaduba Sesay, is one of the many students who graduated from the Law Department. He is also a gospel musician.
Excited, he told Politico how much difference this has made to him.
“It is not only about educational challenge I am also a musician, I am part of a gospel band so balancing my music and education has been tough [as] most of the time my music ate more time but I have been able to manage the two,” he said.
He said he felt proud of his academic achievement. “It is one step and I hope to be enrolled into the law school next academic year. Believe in yourself and accept who you are by the grace of God you will succeed.”
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