Education

Lira Constituent College for Health Sciences at the new Lira University of Science and Technologhy is a young institution, founded only in 2010. Its agenda: to promote knowledge, provide opportunity for learning, and to develop new practices in health sciences, while at the same time providing and developing health services for the local community and the surrounding rural population. What are the odds?

It was the beginning of a new school year. We were new students, on a new African campus, getting to know one another. Our country was decades into independence, was touted in the West as a new African democracy, led by a new generation of African leaders. Recently we marked our golden jubilee. Our leaders pulled out the red carpet and Champaign and insisted on a celebration though in reality our country was in a pitiable way

John Fred Apuli Kamara, the long time Ahmadu Bello University lecturer, 1980-2008, died in Kampala on Monday 22 October 2012 in the early hours of the morning. Kamara as he was to Faculty and Students alike was born on 12 January 1947 in the Toro region of Western Uganda by the slopes of the legendry Mountains of the Moon.

By the end of this decade, four out of every 10 young graduates are going to come from just two countries: China and India. Projections from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) show far reaching shifts in the balance of graduate numbers, with the rising economies of Asia accelerating ahead of the United States and Western Europe.

One night as I lay in my bed reading, a text message arrived from John Otim that read: Kamara write 1000 words on Memories of a Nigerian university campus. For many years Otim and I lived and worked in Northern Nigeria at the Ahmadu Bello University in the city of Zaria located in the north central savannah.