Russian diplomats expelled across US and Europe
WE were awakened at 05:00 hours by the loud noise of a helicopter which was circling the university campus with an announcement from the helicopter’s loud speaker, “You have 45 minutes to pack your bags and leave the campus .... the university has been closed .... !”
We went outside in disbelief to find armed policemen lined up and a fleet of large buses each one labelled with the name of the district for provincial headquarters - CHIPATA, KABWE, NDOLA, MANSA, SOLWEZI, etc.
We were instructed to pack our bags quickly and get in the right bus to take us to our homes free of charge. It was no fun at all, packing at gunpoint and the few students who resisted were arrested immediately.
We were tear-gassed and rubber bullets were used to scare us. However, we managed to start off for home within an hour, that is, 15 minutes later than the command.
1. CALENDAR
During my time the university (name withheld) had a fixed calendar and each academic year was from September to August the following year. It was easy to plan because we knew exactly when we would open and close.
However, the premature and prolonged closure of the university meant that the usual calendar would be disturbed and all our plans as students were disturbed.
Sessional Dates
At the time of registration for each academic year, each student is able to know when the semester or term will start and end. He will also be able to know whether short breaks will be there and how long they will be.
The most important dates of Final Examinations will reflect in the sessional dates. Now with the premature closure all these dates are disturbed and all the planning that was done goes into the drain.
Our closure was indefinite meaning that we didn’t know when the university would reopen. It was torture to experience such suspense of the highest order. It was mental torture of the highest kind.
Efforts to call the academic office were fruitless because the staff had no idea what would happen. Students didn’t know whether to engage in temporary employment or not. We ended up with “no vision” but just sleeping and waking up the next day hoping someone would announce the re-opening of the university.
Learning Time
With all the lost learning time it was obvious that our lecturers would want to recover it by subjecting us to a crash programme. I can still remember the academic torture which we experienced when we returned.
Piled up tests and assignments were the order of the day and sleep was a luxury. So who gets hurt when there is a premature and prolonged closure of a university? Academic stress is a subset of high level mental torture.
2. REPUTATION
Whenever a university is closed for whatever reason, it loses its standing on the international scale. The reputation of the university is lowered in the sense that it is unable to handle a crisis.
This lowering of reputation internationally has negative effects on the progress and development of such a university. It does not matter whether the premature closure was necessitated by cholera or non-payment of meal allowances, a higher learning institution is expected to be above all things.
International Rating
Each university has an international rating based on infrastructure, teaching staff, capacity of the library, stability and so on and so forth.
Premature closure of any university is a sign of instability and can affect academic performance so it definitely contributes to a lower rating on the international scene. A lower rating has several interpretations including inferiority which is a big shame!
Preference
When parents want to send their children to a university they consider a number of things. One of the things they want is for their child to graduate within the prescribed time. Parents will obviously overlook those universities that are famous for premature closure for the simple reason that they have already planned on how much to spend on each child in each particular year.
As you well know in Zambia there are very few families which have only one child. Parents plan that when one child has graduated they can take on the next one.
Sometimes they have 2 or 3 children at the university so prolonged closures are not interesting at all. We can now see that it’s not only the students who suffer but also their parents and guardians.
3. SPONSORS
My close friends and I were Government sponsored so the prolonged closure did not affect our tuition fees. I had other friends who were sponsored by donor-funded NGOs and other institutions who received letters bearing negative news concerning their sponsorship.
Termination of Sponsorship
Some sponsors are strict and very particular so they don’t like wasting time. Juliet, a colleague with a strict sponsor, lost her sponsorship all because the university declared an indefinite closure.
The sponsors were not sure how long they would wait for the university to reopen and it seemed to us that they were in a hurry to educate our colleague so that she could graduate and work for them on a full time basis.
Efforts to make the sponsors change their minds proved futile. I guess we can’t blame these sponsors because they work with time and certain monies had to be disposed of within a specified period of time. Tough luck!
Defer Sponsorship
Towela had shocking news from her sponsors because of the same prolonged premature closure of the university. She was told that because the opening date of the university was unknown, they would defer her sponsorship to later and that she should not worry because they would communicate to her.
It was a very sad day for all of us because she would not manage to sponsor herself that year so it meant pulling out of the university.
Change mind
Mulenga’s sponsors were trying to find a polite way of telling him that the indefinite premature closure of the university meant that they were no longer interested in sponsoring him so they simply told him that they had changed their mind.
Whether they were going to compensate Mulenga for the inconvenience they had caused to him by changing their minds was not an issue. The issue was that Mulenga had no capacity to sponsor himself so now he was out of the university.
4. ECONOMY
Every time university students lose an academic year to a premature closure or indeed just a part of the academic year, they lose or delay their earning power by a considerable percentage.
When a student graduates and starts earning income either by being employed or by entrepreneurial activities, he benefits economically as an individual and his parents or guardians benefit through an economic breather as well and it is not even necessary to explain that the government benefits economically from him directly or indirectly. Therefore premature closures which are prolonged have a long term effect on the economy.
5. SOCIAL ISSUES
In Zambia, pupils finish school at the age of 18 years on the average and as you know they have to wait for about a year or more before they are admitted into a public university.
This means that when they are in first year at the university, they are about 19 to 20 years old so they will be about 21 or 22 years old in second year and so on.
Without considering the others who are 25 years old or so, we can see that the bulk of university students are not far from the adolescent stage.
Boredom
Young people easily get bored when there is nothing meaningful to do. This boredom gets worse when they have to wait for a university to open but they don’t know when that would be.
Young people experience this boredom in form of a vacuum which they feel that they should fill up. You can guess what some of them would do to fill up that vacuum.
Mwansa was in his third year when the university closed prematurely and due to boredom he took to beer drinking. He drank anything that came his way including the very hard stuff.
By the time the university reopened, Mwansa had changed completely.
We could notice his trembling hands everywhere we went be it the lecture room, the cafeteria and even at the chapel. Was Mwansa becoming addicted to alcohol? Whose fault was this?
When the university finally opened, we noticed that our friend Dorothy’s hands had turned grey and they looked kind of chapped in sharp contrast to her well painted nails.
We got suspicious and decided to ask her why her hands looked like that. To our surprise she started explaining amidst sobs that during the long closure she had tried some smoke just for fun but now she thirsts for more and more each day. We all wondered whether Dorothy was getting addicted to smoking. I guess I will never figure out whose fault it was.
Mental Alertness
We noticed that sadly, the long break had affected our mental alertness. We had to strive to bring our minds back to the learning mode because we didn’t know when the university would reopen so our brains had adopted a “relax mode” which was not easy to come out of upon a sudden announcement that we should report back as quickly as possible or lose our places.
I guess closing universities should be classified as an intellectual sin! God help us.