FBC – Road to Glory Again?
To read that the oldest university south of the Sahara is fifth from bottom among universities in Africa is disheartening, especially when you think it used to be the cream and reference point in years gone by. (Photo: FBC students scrambling for everything nowadays )
Two months back the Vice Chancellor told new matriculates that this great university – Fourah Bay College (FBC) – should not be found to be on trial by any, and whoever wants to questions its glory should know that it is their taste that is on trial.
“Fourah Bay College is the Athens of West Africa, full stop. What is left for you the present crop of students is to carry on this torch of glory into tomorrow and beyond,” he said.
Hmm.
It’s a glorious university indeed – a university that lacks everything amenable, everything on the list that should be in a university, including the inability of its administration to foster law and order. I need not mention the violence-ridden nature of its student body since God knows when. It is a commonwealth of woe and disunity, which needs more than a Hercules to clean its stables and bring sanity and respect to this old university once again, the Athens of West Africa!
So it is refreshing to see that this unwholesome state of affairs of the university is a burden on the powers that be, and they have come at last to straighten or lighten things up. The Government of Sierra Leone has secured a twenty million loan from the OPEC Fund and the Arab Bank to rehabilitate, develop, and expand Fourah Bay College into something proper and befitting the first university of the country.
Hon Pateh Bah
I felt good to see every Member of Parliament being in support of the loan and speaking with one voice towards the enactment of that agreement on Thursday 13 June 2013. Among the members who spoke was the MP of the Constituency itself on which FBC is located (Constituency 92), Hon Pateh Bah.
One is yet to see someone who is as enthusiastic about this project as him – he smiles and gestures with gladness about the necessity of FBC being on the road and map of glory again. He even had a new name for it – “it’s our own Oxbridge,” he stated. (Oxbridge is the shortened form for England’s Oxford and Cambridge Universities).
I understand his enthusiasm – he went to college in England, the country that worships learning. He has vowed to be around everyone who is concerned regarding the rehabilitation and expansion of Fourah Bay College. Plus, when that is finished, he means to enroll at the university as that has been his life-long dream, to be a Fourahite. And he is just not concerned about the university but the whole of his constituency where already he is tackling roads, electricity, water supply and Lord knows what. I hope his enthusiasm lasts, and he gets the support and funds he needs in this country of bureaucracy and lukewarmness.
For our generation, and for posterity, it makes fine reading to see FBC climbing the pinnacle again and once there, we should all join hands to keep her there. And yet, truth be told, this is not the case presently because FBC – like the rest of the nation – has been divided into a sad collection of interest groups, tribes, region, and faiths. We care more for the success of these groupings than for the general welfare of the university itself where everything at best is rotten and at worst is despicable.
The truth is this state will continue until our sense of duty and honour is sorely tasked – and I think now is that time – when we all together should say enough is enough, either give us the real McCoy or take away the whole balderdash!
Therefore fine buildings or call it rehabilitation and expansion of the college is not enough; our minds and our approach to the university whether we are students or we are staff there should change correctly like time. It matters now to be on the lookout for the question marks and provide answers, or better still, remove them. We are capable, we are able.
Elias Bangura
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