Just Propaganda Universities

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.



According to a Ghana News Agency (GNA) report, on February 7 and 8, President John Evans Atta-Mills will cut sods to initiate the construction of two universities located, respectively, in the Brong-Ahafo and Volta regions (See “President to Cut Sod for Two University Projects” Ghanaweb.com 2/6/11). These projects, of course, are in consonance with promises made on the hustings in the lead-up to Election 2008.

In principle, there is every reason to applaud such initiative, since every addition to the existing capacity of our public higher educational institutions, implies a salubrious opportunity to increasing the country’s available pool of highly trained professionals and academics for national development.

The foregoing observation, however, pertains in theory. In reality, these two projects are highly unlikely to meet their stipulated objective of training and graduating highly skilled energy and environmental-resource management experts. They would simply end up frustrating and further aggravating the aspirations of otherwise enviably talented and productive Ghanaian youths.

We make the foregoing observations because under the governments of the so-called National Democratic Congress (NDC), the educational sector has been woefully under-funded; the general level of academic achievement and quality has also been at its lowest ebb in the country’s postcolonial history. And, to-date, none of our dozen, or so, poly-technical institutes have been upgraded to the status of Bachelor’s degree-awarding institutions.

And so it is not quite clear precisely what the Brong-Ahafo regional minister means when Mr. Kwadwo Nyamekye Marfo vaunts about the NDC having extended higher education into the northern-half of the country. It is also not clear what the current level of infrastructural development is at the sites of the two proposed institutions, especially with the minister announcing, pontifically, that the first in-take of students will begin come September 2011.

What is clear, however, is that to-date the so-called University of Development Studies (UDS), the prime bragging landmark of the NDC, has yet to boast of adequate infrastructural facilities. In essence, the argument here is that rather than vacuously pretend to be about the sacred and laudable business of remarkably expanding our higher educational institutions, such capital resources as may be readily available to the government, could be put to greater and better use by targeting the improvement, quality and capacity of the country’s five major universities. Some of the same resource could then be invested in the upgrading and expansion of our poly-technical institutes, the nerve centers of our local economies.

It is also significant to note here, at least in passing, that neither Messrs. Marfo, the Brong-Ahafo regional minister, and Mr. Joseph Amenowode, his Volta regional counterpart, has told their audiences precisely where the faculties and staffs of the two universities will be drawn from when full operations begin in September this year. And neither have we, the Ghanaian public, been told exactly how much it will cost when both constructional and operational targets have been fully met.



At any rate, if the preceding projects sound like a desperate leader’s straw-grasping attempt at making himself relevant to Ghanaian voters, come Election 2012, dear reader, you may not be too far off the mark.



*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English, Journalism and Creative Writing at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is a Governing Board Member of the Accra-based Danquah Institute (DI) and the author of “The Obama Serenades” (Lulu.com, 2011). E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net.

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