The Director of Communications at the University of Sierra Leone, Dr. Tonya Musa has in a telephone interview with Politico on Friday disclosed that Fourah Bay College students will start residing in the refurbished and newly constructed dormitories between January and March next year.
Dr. Musa said by that time, two remaining tasks, the installation of the pre-paid meters and reconnecting of the water supply system to the hostels would have been completed.
In what is seen as a completely new arrangement, the accommodation business will no longer be run by the college administration, instead a private company has been contracted to manage it.
According to the Director, the college administration has outsourced the managing of the hostels to a company called SEMCO, the agreement between the two parties signed quite recently. He explained that SEMCO is a real estate company which will fully oversee the day to day management of the hostels, and that students intending to reside in the dormitories during their studies would have to fill out an application form. Dr. Musa however pointed out that students applying for accommodation will have to meet three key criteria to be able to take up residence in campus.
He said they must have registered and paid full tuition fees, be law- abiding and “academically progressive, ’’ to be admitted in the hostels. Those are the students, he noted, that would be first given preference. Asked why academic performance should be tied to making available accommodation to a student, Dr. Musa asserted that they wouldn’t want to have people with ‘’ more and more references’’ occupying the rooms and would prefer those with ‘’good results and high grade points’’.
‘’We want to have some sanity,’’ he added.
On the question of rumours going around of the authorities unfairly allocating rooms to students already, Dr. Musa denied the claim and spoke of them getting ‘’credible intelligence’’ that some students were planning to protest over an issue he dismissed as untrue.
‘’How can we allocate hostels to students when the work is not even completed’’, he countered.
The college dormitories and other buildings had dilapidated over time and were in a very bad shape and by the time the authorities suspended student residency some ten years ago, there were not enough rooms to house the ever growing student population.
Fourah Bay College was for the past of four years undergoing extensive construction of additional infrastructure and renovation of existing facilities. Funds for the project were provided by a number of Arab countries through the Arab Bank for Economic Development in Africa (BADEA).
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