No respect, say university students

When James Kouma completed his Bachelor of Arts degree at Lome University 15 years ago, he tried and tried but failed to find “a proper job”, he says. Now 38 and a father of two, he earns a perilous living driving a motor-bike taxi or “Zemidjan”, along with thousands of other young people. Kouma also makes money teaching French in a private school. But most of the time nowadays his eyebrows and beard are covered in the fine dust he picks up from his time on the roads, the dust that blows in from the Sahara each year this season. “When I couldn’t find a proper job I bought myself a motorbike with my savings,” he told IRIN. “It’s tough doing two jobs but I can’t pay the rent with just the teaching job.” “I don’t know why I worked so hard at university to wind up riding a Zemidjan!” he went on. While West Africa’s big cities are jammed pack with jobless graduates who would agree with him, student life is far tougher nowadays across the region than it ever was. And according to the president of one student union, Kohan Kidekiyime Binafame of MEET, around 30 percent of Lome’s Zemidjan two-wheel taxis are students. Others work as security guards to help pay their way. At Lome University, students complain of snakes and filth on campus grounds, science teachers who’ve never carried out practical tests for lack of equipment and lecture-halls so packed that sitting space is rented out. In Kouma’s day, Lome University, built in 1970, was a small campus of 6,000 proud and privileged students learning in lecture halls seating 300. Today the campus is crammed with 25,000 students, four bigger lecture halls have been added, and a fifth, seating 1,000 students, is under construction. Making ends meet was easier too for the average student two decades ago. Enrolment cost a mere 4,500 CFA francs (US $8) a year at the time, 10 percent of the cost of a student card today. A bus ride from anywhere in town to university back then cost US 1 cent and meals 15 cents. Cheap rooms were available on campus, and there were government scholarships of US $39 a month.

Port of Lome

Sardines in a tin Today scholarships have been scrapped due to economic hardship, but under pressure from student bodies the government has sliced by 50 percent annual enrolment fees to around US $40. The few bus rides available however are at US 10 cents, meals are 90 cents and rooms are twice the rate as in the past. “We are badly treated,” said Marc, a third year natural sciences student. “Classes often begin at 7:30 a.m. but the bus is late and we are squashed inside. Once a passer-by looked up and said ‘You look like sardines in a tin’, and I was so ashamed because we are the new generation of leaders but there is no respect.” The 3,800 students enrolled at the Economics and Management Faculty have similar complaints. “I have to wake up at 3:30 a.m. so I can get to university by 4 a.m. and find a seat,” said 23-year-old Micheline. “If you get to class late you have to pay 10 cents for a seat, or even more if you want a place up the front.” Meza, a 22-year-old first-year Law student dressed in blue jeans and a white shirt, said she walks a few kilometres every morning and then takes a 15-cent Zemidjan motorbike ride the rest of the way. “At night I walk all the way back because I haven’t got enough money for the return fare.” English students, she said, spend much of the day on the lookout for empty classrooms because the modern languages faculty has not been assigned space.

A Zemidjan two-wheeler taxi sets off with a passenger

Horses on the campus Asked where they spend much of the day, some Lome University students quip “in the bush, like most people.” The campus grounds are notoriously dirty, a favourite spot for frogs, snakes and other reptiles, with weeds growing about the place and local people using them as toilets. Some locals plant corn, millet and beans in remote parts of the grounds, and horses amble by to graze. As for the university library, many of the books available are out of date and anyway are often missing key pages, ripped out by students too impoverished to pay for photocopies. The university does have an internet centre, but with only 17 computers, and teachers moan about lack of equipment. “We get a box of chalk per year for three professors and generally buy our own paper, and laboratory equipment is often so old it doesn’t work - that means that some of the lecturers have purely theoretical knowledge, they’ve never been able to carry out practical tests for lack of equipment,” said a science lecturer who gave his name only as Komi. Given the conditions, dropouts are common. “I started studying sociology in 2002, when the enrolment fee was supposed to be halved from US $80 to around US $40,” said 28-year-old Marcel Attivi. “I worked as a motorbike-taxi driver during the holidays to pay off my fees but by the end of the year the government still hadn’t decreased the fees and I had to give up.” “Now that I’ve been working for two years I think I’ve lost the reflexes to go on studying,” he said. “Anyway, what’s the point, all the graduates wind up driving a Zemidjan!” That, said Binafame, the president of MEET student union, was absolutely true. “Lome University produces nothing but unemployed people. There are people who graduated a decade ago who are still sitting at home.” Students currently were sitting half-term exams, he said “and the supervisors are mostly graduates from the last six years who still don’t have a proper job.”