Unanswered questions remain over One University project

Editor, The imminent merger of public universities is strange. Yes, it’s now a policy. But public universities will eventually have more bureaucratic barriers than ever before. It’s going to derail implementation of most income generating projects and, worse still, research will take a nosedive.If all this is being done in the name of curtailing government expenditure, then it’s rather contradictory since history has shown that most externally funded university projects have miserably collapsed.Rwanda is poor at research compared to other most of the East African countries. If procurement of citric acid for KIST (now to become College of Technology) will take six months, when will a project designed to end in one year ever be successful?It is not an effective way of running public institutions of higher learning. I have never heard of this anywhere in the whole world. It’s only in Rwanda. Perhaps I am being pessimistic, but only time will tell.James Munanura, Student at Makerere University, Kampala Uganda********************I think the university merger is interesting but its likely to be unproductive. Let’s look in the past when several public institutions were merged into RDB – Rwanda Tourism is the only institution that stood out from the crowd. If the individual universities are already falling short (I could elaborate on this at a later time), putting broken parts together just worsens everything. This is where I agree with you dear Mr. Asiimwe – “we need audits and thorough justifications for these mergers”. Thank you.Denise Arinaitwe, KimironkoReaction to Arthur Asiimwe’s opinion, “Need for an audit on institutional merger”, (The New Times, April 18)

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Unanswered questions remain over One University project