By Umaru Fofana
When I ran for president of the Fourah Bay College students’ union in 1995, my four challengers and I relied on the gift of the gab to canvass for votes. I was an impoverished, emaciated-looking 22-year-old who struggled to get a square meal a day. I would wear two shirts throughout the week and did not care about ensemble, even if I was handsome and looked good in them.
Because they believed in me, my supporters bought shirts and shoes for me to make me look as good as I sounded. I won – by a landslide – with over 80% of the votes. I was not a member of any social club even if many of them rallied behind me. Of course I was a member of a political movement which was established to break a political hegemony.
I refused to join a club in part because months before entering university I had read Kwame Nkrumah’s autobiography in which he wrote in rather uncomplimentary terms about the things that would go on in clubs and cult groups on college campuses. I later regretted and wished I had joined one or two. For the sake of this piece I won’t name those two now, nor give reasons why I regretted not joining them.
Suffice it to say however that some social clubs and political movements can bring about everlasting friendships. I have seen that manifested every now and again, both in my life and in the lives of many others I know. This is why I am totally opposed to the decision by the Ministry of Tertiary and Higher Education to ban the students’ union of Fourah Bay College and – by extension – clubs, after skirmishes between supporters of two political camps. Even without investigating the riots.
On my inauguration day as students’ union president, I wore an oversized gold-colour suit that had been lent to me by Jaffar Kuyateh. We were classmates studying French. And a political rival who would later become one of my closest ever fiends, of blessed memory, bought me a pair of shoes. Needles to say he didn’t tell anyone that he did. But that was that for that.
As students’ union president, we confronted the NPRC junta of Capt Valentine Strasser when Christiana Thorpe was the education minister (Secretary of State for Education as it was called then). Fees had been increased, astronomically, and we wanted them reduced to the previous year’s level. Njala University – then a constituent college of the University of Sierra Leone – had been displaced by the rebel war without being relocated by the authorities. We wanted the students to resume lectures in Freetown. The government met both demands because of a single protest march into town. The divide on campus was bridged. Both sides saw beyond the self. The power of solidarity achieved that!
How times have changed for students’ union politics at FBC! Today, actually in recent times – not least in the last 10 years – violence and tribalism have become the strategy to get a 100% electorate to vote for a candidate. The use of invectives has become the norm around elections at FBC. Students no longer cohere. They no longer even care for their own welfare and rights. Not for their own good. So much so that they see themselves as enemies and spend their energy in that fight, rather than on the drive to advocate for their welfare. What this does is to enable the college administration and the central government to cash in on the schism to do things that are not in the interest of students, such as banning their union and clubs.
In a move that I find objectionable, the college administration almost acts in a kneejerk manner – often with the direct involvement of the central government – whenever there is unrest on campus emanating from student politics. On at least three occasions in recent years, students’ union elections have had to be called off, and the union banned because of political violence.
The violence would often be perpetrated by supporters who sense the imminent defeat of their candidate. It is a very wrong approach by the authorities to ban the rights of students to a union under the pretext of political violence on campus. Plain and simple! They behave like carpenters in whose eyes the solution to every problem is a hammer.
In this day and age the authorities cannot use mobile phone footage to investigate wrongdoing and take action against culprits. They instead go for the easy option of calling off the election and banning the students’ union. This is grossly unfair.
It would be in the best interest of the college administration, the innocent students and the central government to reschedule the students’ union election at FBC to hold as soon as possible. They students need their leaders to be there for them in dealing with the administration, as does the administration who needs them to deal with the students. As students’ union president I attended meetings at the disciplinary committee where sanctions were imposed on defaulting students. You can imagine what the reaction of students is likely to be if they didn’t have a representative when a decision was arrived at against them, even though the numbers were wickedly stacked against the students’ representatives.
I would not be surprised if the authorities came up with some pro tem students’ leadership arrangement whose composition they would determine in more ways than one. How could any such group seek the interest of their fellow students whose rights are being trampled upon?
College is supposed to be a training ground. If the politically violent ones are punished and the innocent ones are let go of, it will serve as a lesson for both parties that in future national politics bad behaviour will be rewarded accordingly.
If political conflicts in colleges are left unaddressed they would only be being postponed and could snowball into something more sinister. The vicious World War I-type Sri Lankan war comes to mind.
The trampling on the rights of students at FBC was cited as one of the causes of our bloody conflict. It has so far not gotten anywhere close to that heavy-handedness, but such blatant deprivation of the right and freedom of students poses its own unfavourable ramifications.
During the NPRC days a Ghanaian professor Kwame delved into how the rights of students did not matter at all at FBC. Finding a copy of that report right is like looking for human life. I wish it could be found and the whole education reform taken along as one big swoop. Let students have their union back! Their president will take responsibility in cases of riots. I did take some, even though on one occasion the defaulting students mocked my poorly sewn trousers.
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