GETFUND Law Will Be Reviewed- Kufuor

President John Agyekum Kufuor yesterday said the law on the Ghana Education Trust Fund (GETFUND) would be reviewed in due course to cover deserving private universities. He was speaking at the inauguration of the first Catholic University in Ghana at Sunyani in Brong Ahafo.

President Kufuor noted that for more than a century, churches in Ghana "have been key allies of government in education delivery at the first and second cycle levels" and acknowledged that they founded and nurtured a majority of leading Secondary Schools.

Discipline and scholarships fostered by church schools have become priceless assets for nation building, he added and commended them for their immense contribution to education in the country.

President Kufuor said the response of religious bodies to society's need for more tertiary institutions through the setting up of a number of universities was complementing government efforts and creating alternative avenues to offer more qualified students access to tertiary education.

"In the wake of complaints of widespread indiscipline in the country, especially among the youth, education delivery by religious institutions, with predictable emphasis on religious values and discipline will augur well for the nation's development".

President Kufuor, however, noted that there was the need for a serious transformation and improvement of the current tertiary education system to enable it to meet the socio-economic challenges facing the nation now and in the foreseeable future. He noted that there was a crying need for the doubling of infrastructure capacity of the state universities to meet the accommodation, teaching, research and faculties as a result of numerous qualified students, many of whom get frustrated by the current state of affairs.

Tertiary institutions should also undergo a critical psychological orientation to enable them produce human resource needs for the social,industrial and international market adjustments of the 21st century, the President said. He called on newly established universities not to be just replicas of existing ones but to be development-oriented and to provide educational rogrammes with the right mix of science and technology on the one hand and thical humanity on the other.

His Eminence Peter Cardinal Appiah Turkson, Chancellor of the University, aid the vision of the church was to create a university "that operates at the utting edges of the Information Technology (IT) revolution and an institution f high academic and technical excellence whose products are endowed with real ractical ability". He gave the assurance that the university would pay attention to the development of moral and principled leadership in order to foster moral leadership in the next generation. Fr. Michael J. Schultheis, President of the University disclosed that until the office of the President of the Republic grants the university its own charter, it would be under the guidance of the University of Ghana.

Present were people from all walks of life including Ministers of State, members of the Diplomatic Corps, District Chief Executives, traditional leaders, the Catholic clergy and other religious leaders, businessmen and the academia. There were goodwill messages from the University of Ghana, Legon, and Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST).

President Kufour, who was accompanied by the First Lady, Madam Theresa, later cut a sod for the commencement of work on the permanent buildings for the University at Fiapre, near Sunyani.