By Landing Colley
Hon. Seedia Jatta, national assembly member for Wuli West on Tuesday urged the University of the Gambia to either provide fundamental learning tools for students or close down if they cannot produce the fundamental tools required for all the university in the world that is knowledge and skills.
“University is not just to have an image which does not exist, but is an institution that helps to develop skills because we need those fundamental tools knowledge and skills if they can’t produce that here, close up and you stop wasting our time,” he said.
“How can university send students to another university to learn something that they can’t offer? It shows that there is something fundamental missing and unless we address it, or the Gambia university will be there as a university only, and that’s not what we want,” he added.
According to him, two decades old and still the university had no structure unit for research and there is a big competition among the university around the globe, saying that people choose to go to the best where they can have the best knowledge and the skills but not a university where there is no skills and knowledge creation.
He pointed out that university is not a high school and running it needs a huge amount of money and university are not created for the sake of creating them, stressing that with all this inadequacy they are still talking about creating third and fourth university in the Gambia.
“University can’t exist without professor, because professor creates skills and knowledge and before becoming a professor you must have the capacity to create skills. The university must prepare a budget because it needs enough funds and this is the reason why the university doesn’t have a good library up to date,” he said.
“If you want to serve this institution better prepare a budget that is in line with the needs of university,” he added.