Blame the Vice-Chancellor Victim

If you have a pack of congresspeople who have seen nothing of life and are short of experience, they will blame a vice-chancellor-doer who is attempting to develop and has achieved a lot for his University.

I have studied, worked and taught in nine different universities on three different continents. Only one out of the nine had two streets as a public thoroughfare. In fact, only one street ran across campus because the other one was blocked at a point, to leave an L-shaped access.

Some six (over a stretch of about 12 blocks with two houses forming a block) pedestrian and vehicle traffic lights strictly checked over-speeding and reckless driving. Movement was further monitored with CCTV cameras. I received my first and only pedestrian crossing ticket for crossing a red 'don't walk' light in that university.

If the incompetent and ignorant congress actor jesters had any idea like that, they will not be attacking a university for daring to control access to its roads, let alone incredibly reduce the attack to the person of, by all standards, a very efficient vice-chancellor.

Mass transit systems such as buses, trams and underground rail systems usually have access to campuses. These are disciplined transportation systems and not the uncontrolled 'trotro' system congress has promoted and continues to promote in this motherland.

Actually, the metro mass transport (MMT) or Kufuor buses, have been running on the University of Ghana campus to help move people from place to place on that vast campus. When I was a student on that campus in the mid-1970s, along with a number of current congress powerbrokers and exercisers, there was absolutely no trotro or taxi service on campus.

My roommate at Commonwealth Hall walked to the School of Performing Arts at the main gate for lectures after breakfast. He returned to the Hall for lunch and then back to classes again. I did my own trekking back and forth to the then Department of Library and Archival Studies.

True, our generation of students, the to-be congress elements included, were fed three balanced meals a day, fuelling us with enough energy to be walking up and down. Also true is the fact that vehicular traffic, more by accident than design, was minimal.

A vice-chancellor is a chief executive who executes to promote, protect and secure the welfare of her/his constituents comprising students, teachers, administrators and others. A vice-chancellor administers a community.

The University of Ghana community includes, in addition to those identified above, the banking, postal services and all types of vending organisations. The latter have multiplied since congress decided from 1982, to drastically reduce state support for higher education (which in their talk and do nothing ways renamed tertiary education).

Until the patriotic people came to the rescue from 2001, FCUBE was all that education was about and the universities were left to rot. Vice-chancellors were hardly given resources to run universities. It is that starvation which led to the introduction of university fee-paying in the mid-1990s.

At the University of Ghana, in particular, you can still see uncompleted structures, some dating as far back as the General Kutu Acheampong era. The period (1982-2000, 2009-date[2014]) of congress dictatorship or pseudo-autocracy with its attendant kleptocracy, has been the worst for the motherland's higher education.

Visit the campus and you will see at least five uncompleted building projects and the stadium that were begun between 2004 and 2008, and some of which were almost completed when they took over in 2009. One of them, the Arts Faculty building, was started during Acheampong's time. They halted it in 1982, and it still stands uncompleted.

Vice-Chancellor Ernest Aryeetey, the man they are doing all they can to vilify, has just managed to start roofing that building congress abandoned in 1982. It is one little part of his remarkable achievements over the last four years.

Besides completing some structures he met uncompleted, he has engineered projects in the university's core business of scholarship such as textbook development. The PhD programme has been restructured. The roads project, which the congress government promised support for from day one, but reneged under public pressure, stands as one of his most lasting legacies.

What it is about the congresspeople is that they detest progress; they are allergic to anything that will improve the living standards of my compatriots and I. Congresspeople cannot stand any achiever. They have no idea about achievement, thinking to destroy is to achieve.

My concern may be belated, but I hope by the time this piece comes out, congress retrogressive and destructive thinking would not have denied Professor Ernest Aryeetey, the extended term he needs to finish the projects the University of Ghana has set for itself and thereby achieve what the professor envisioned for the University.

For those who favour congress destruction painted as construction, that approach would take the motherland nowhere.