By Mohamed Jaward Nyallay
Some students of the Fourah Bay College, FBC, have expressed dissatisfaction over last week’s meeting with President Ernest Bai Koroma, saying that it does not meet their expectations.
The students, who were the leaders of the spontaneous protest that prompted the meeting, said the consultations failed to resolve the problems because State House engaged the wrong set of students.
The meeting on Wednesday 16 March was alleged to have been organised with the help of the National Union of Sierra Leone Students (NUSS), shutting out most of the protesting students who had questioned the leadership of NUSS.
“It is only the protest that brought the attention of State House to our plights as students in Fourah Bay College, therefore the organisers of the protest must have been part of the meeting,” said Umaru Damon Samai, one of three protesters who were present in the Wednesday meeting at State House.
Samai was invited because he was head of the Mass Communication Students Association.
On Monday 14, March the students were stopped half way to State House and a few of their leaders were taken to meet with representatives of the President. That meeting paved the way for the following Wednesday’s meeting.
According to one of the students who were invited to the meeting with the President, the entire session was managed by NUSS and State House officials.
“I am not satisfied with the outcome of the meeting. The only thing we gained was that the registration process has been extended by a week,” said Brima Musa, head of the club Auradicals.
On Tuesday 15 March the President of NUSS, Mohamed Sheridan Kamara, said the protest leaders would not be invited because they were not legitimate.
“In their place I have invited all society presidents because they are legitimate student representatives,” said Sheridan Kamara, whose leadership at the head of the national students body was itself questioned by many students.
Even the independent media, including Politico, was prevented from covering the meeting.
There was a heavy presence of security in and around the State House as the meeting was going on. Soldiers and police, most of them armed with guns, batons and teargas masks, checked anyone who entered the State House premises. But that hardly prevented students from clustering around different entrance points to the president’s office.
The police had issued a statement warning students against staging any further protests. Police spokesman Braima Kamara told a local radio station in the morning of Wednesday 16 that they had intelligence that some “misguided students” wanted to stage another protest and warned that their actions would not be condoned.
State House, after the meeting, issued a statement outlining its outcome. Chief among them was that students would be allowed one more week to register and clear their backlog tuition fees.
There were questions about what NUSS achieved from the meeting.
“Concerns like the immediate resumption of classes, slow registration process and the general inefficiency of some FBC staff were key in the message of the protesting students on Monday but none of them was addressed promptly in Wednesday’s meeting,” Samai claimed.
But NUSS President Sheridan Kamara told Politico that they achieved a number of things, among them a promise to reinstitute the students union at the college.
“We agreed that the Student Union will be brought back as early as this April and students should not pay full fees when they repeat the year,” the NUSSpresident said.
For the last four years FBC has not had a student union after the authorities banned club activities on campus. Ahead of last week’s meeting, NUSS had centered its campaign on bringing back student representation.
“Our primary concern is that students should have a student representation,” Sheridan Kamara to Politico on Tuesday.
(C) Politico 22/03/16
