Juliana looks excited. For very good reasons too. As she talks to me she almost sheds tears of joy. Abubakarr is overwhelmed. He has to be. After all they two of them have just graduated from the University of Makeni, the first private university in Sierra Leone. But even more important is that UNIMAK, as it is know by its acronym, is the first university in the northern Sierra Leone. A region that lags behind the rest of the country in more ways than one. UN and other figures put it behind the rest of the country in many areas especially education and poverty.
It is Saturday 12 February 2012. The first batch of graduates has just been churned out at UNIMAK. For some reason it is the last region in the country to be visited by Western education. After the Bo School in the south and Kenema Secondary School in the east had been established. Not to mention the Western Area where education, virtually, started in West Africa. And the significance of the University of Makeni is not lost in the Acting Vice Chancellor, The Rev Fr Joe Turay. “If you look at all the indicators – health, education, even poverty...the north has the highest incidents of poverty, illiteracy rates” he told me. It is even grimmer for women in the region. For example “...there are no female teachers in any of the secondary schools in Koinadugu district” Fr Joe went on, adding “the north [is] waking up...[the advent of UNIMAK] indicates that the north is also embracing education. It is a huge opportunity for northerners...It is a dream come true”. A huge opportunity! An absolute dream come true!
I remember during my brief schooling in Makeni, when I was not dreaming of ever going to Fourah Bay College because I hardly knew anyone in Freetown nor could my parents afford it, and thinking whether I could enrol at a university in the Makeni township and save cost. Then it dawned on me that I could not do so. The same thing dawned on many of my classmates at Benevolent Islamic Secondary School and most of them dropped out since they did not fancy the idea of attending the then Makeni Teachers' College. What UNIMAK does, or should do, is to tap into that vacuum and fill it out. By so doing they can save a crucial element of the country's population and build the workforce of a region which sits on a huge deposit of iron ore – probably the second largest after Brazil – yet the locals do mostly menial jobs and get paid relatively paltry sums as salary.
Apparently because of the late arrival in the north of education generally, but especially higher education, some unpleasant traditional practices still hold deep. Many parents prefer sending their daughters to early marriage to sending them to school let alone college or university. Some organisations have spoken in the past of the difficulty in recruiting staff in the region. The late coming of university education has meant many organisations operating in the region have been finding it difficult to recruit locals owing to its low human capacity. The region sits on a huge deposit of iron ore and it is hoped its new university will help shape up and uplift its people.
In the Tejan Kabbah administration, a government policy of free-tuition education for girls in the north, which still exists, was introduced in an apparent bid to address this imbalance. The establishment of a the University of Makeni by the Catholic Church therefore is a welcome move for which hands must be on deck to make the university stay and live up. Yes to stay and serve the whole country but especially to penetrate the rural areas in the north and encourage those women there to come to the university classroom. Of the 104 that graduated less than 20% were women. And a good number of them come from outside the north. They'd come from other parts of the country to get educated. Not a bad idea but certainly more northern women should be encouraged to enrol.
UNIMAK has expanded and is still expanding. But it should avoid biting more than it can chew. Its Information Technology school that is stationed at Yoni has some issues. The Indian lecturers there who are from Tamil Nadu can barely speak English and the students complain they hardly learn anything.
Also, following the convocation, some students from the Mass Communications department approached me and complained that they do not even have tape recorders let alone video cameras in their department. You cannot teach journalism at university level without these very basic tools the students need. And this is a private university where the fees are comparatively very high. It is unfair therefore to not have recorders for the students.
I also noticed from speaking to some of the students that there is no students' union. All they have is a Students' Representative Council whose members are selected by the college administration. This is a travesty! Seven years of the existence of the university there has to be a union government to protect the rights of students.
And I find something bizarre: President Ernest Bai Koroma was awarded an honorary doctorate degree of letters. When the University of Sierra Leone has awarded successive presidents a doctorate degree the rationale has been that the head of state is the Chancellor of the University. In the case of the former military leader Valentine Strasser, I understand he was offered but he would not accept it. He also hardly ever performed any function as chancellor of the university. Now in the case of UNIMAK there was no compelling reason to have awarded President Koroma a doctorate degree at their first convocation of the university, however gigantic they may see the president's strides. Thing is, UNIMAK as at now does not award a doctorate degree at taught. It remains incomprehensible therefore how they could have awarded a doctorate degree to anyone, honorarily.
Serious a concern that may be, it does not take away the fact that UNIMAK is a torch which, if allowed to brighten will sparkle to provide answers to many of the questions that have beset the underdevelopment of especially the human capacity of the north. As one local journalist in Makeni observed, amid the singing of the university song by the new graduates, the spectacle that the graduation ceremony presented, will definitely serve as impetus for more interest in university education in the north, nearly 200 years since the founding of Fourah Bay College in Freetown.
