Dear Editor, I am writing in response to a letter published in The New Times of 23 May, 2008 titled SFB should look into lecturers’ problems. According to the letter, the writer only depended on a conversation with his friend who he said was a second year part-time student. The writer does not seem to have carried out any investigation to find out by himself the authenticity of the allegations. The allegation that the School of Finance and Banking (SFB) does not have enough lecturers is absolutely wrong. We have adequate numbers of lecturers in all academic departments to cater for the needs of the departments. Where the numbers are falling short of the requirements, we are deploying part-time lecturers as is the case with all other universities in the world. To sum it all, we have 68 full time and 9 part time lecturers, for all the academic disciplines offered at SFB including specialization subjects. The staff-student ratio of 1:32 is by any standards not bad for a Business School. The writer also alleged that our students missed lessons and examinations for Business Law and Quantitative Techniques courses. The fact is that all subjects were appropriately taught and students had all their tests done in time. The examination session at SFB commenced on 2nd June 2008, hence the allegation that students missed examinations is baseless. The letter was written before the examination session started. The lecturers responsible for these subjects conducted all the lectures and gave assignments and tests as required by the department and never resigned as the writer alleged. The representative of the class that was said to have missed lectures and examinations, Alex Baguma confirms that, his class has never missed lectures and tests and had never raised any complaint to the administration regarding the issue. The writer may want to know that SFB is a public institution and its salary structure is determined by the government, like for all other publicly owned academic institutions of higher learning. It may however, be worth noting that in its effort to motivate its staff, SFB management has put in place an extra workload payment policy, where all lecturers who have extra workload are paid depending on the workload they have. Under this initiative, our lecturers who teach in evening programmes are also paid extra allowance and transport allowance. It is our hope that our stakeholders and the general public have understood the real situation obtaining at SFB. SFB management invites the writer of the article to be bold enough and visit SFB to get first hand information about the School, if he has good intention for SFB. Buyinza
