To you, Mr President and Head of State, the University of Buea says welcome. We say it with pride because we are your brainchild; we say it with gratitude because we are objects of your steadfast attention. Indeed, UB is Mr. Paul Biya’s creation.
The Reunification of our nation Cameroon, which we are celebrating, affords us, here at UB, a privileged window through which to showcase our young but iconic history and, by so doing, salute the architect of Cameroon’s Higher Education policy in the person of His Excellency President Paul Biya.
The University of Buea, UB, The Place to Be in the popular imagination, encodes two defining moments in Cameroon’s march towards greater scientific achievement; namely, the creation, in 1986, of the Buea University Centre and the upgrading, in 1993, of the Centre to a full University. By some propitious coincidence, the University Centre was assigned the primordial mission of sustaining the nation’s bilingual character. Today, that assignment reveals to us the patriotic foresight of those who imagined it. Bilingualism is our country’s flagship and we, here at UB, are at once honoured and humbled to have been entrusted with the duty of its care.
The Buea University Centre was part of a grand project of scientific awakening that spoke to the surging quest in young Cameroonians. By the early 1990s the University of Yaounde was bursting at its seams. How this potentially volatile situation was handled is again a feather on the New Deal achievement hat. Rising to its metaphor, thanks to good midwifery, the Mother University of Yaounde delivered six other universities.
The 1993 University Reforms can rightly be viewed as the birth of Higher Education in Cameroon, and UB as one of its most watched, because one of its most promising, offshoots. From a fledgling institution of just four faculties in 1993, UB today boasts of no fewer than seven Faculties, a College of Technology, and an Advanced School of Translators and Interpreters. The Faculties cover such disciplines as medicine, science, technology and agriculture; and the curricula of the other faculties have been given more professional emphasis, the intention being to bring them up to speed with the rigours of the global market.
We can surmise from this picture that UB is living up to the promise of 1993. It is doing so through quality assurance, staff growth and infrastructural development and ICT application. In terms of quality assurance, the BMP mode, which places a special premium on student-centred pedagogy, provides the appropriate context for curriculum delivery and follow-up. The result is that our graduates are competing most favourably in the scientific and professional fields, and are making of themselves veritable flag bearers not only of UB’s creed of excellence, but indeed of our country’s Higher Education vision. UB students are a winning investment. That much too we can say about our staff whose dedication to the job and high profile achievements demonstrate their connectedness to the very best in their respective areas. Government is to be thanked here for its financial booster, mainly by way of the staff modernization grant. The proven sustainability of this financial source makes pre-vision easier and research goals more attainable.
But quality assurance and staff development, important as they are, cannot alone tell the whole story of UB’s new dynamics. This story is housed in a bold and ambitious infrastructural policy which builds tomorrow’s university with today’s acumen. One only has to take a walk through UB campus to capture the feel of a University in evolution. Buildings rise with regular purposefulness, and equipment is acquired with special attention to functionality and relevance. These three perspectives constitute the sustaining pillars of UB’s mission, summarized in teaching, research and outreach.
One final compartment we pride ourselves on is the new student consciousness. From an impressionable mind often victim to destructive influences, today’s UB student has matured into a new agent of order and discipline; but, more especially, into an engine of collective responsibility. The immediate dividends of this positive change are felt in the strong bonds that now unite the different corps entrusted with the life of the Institution. One does not need to be told that UB is back on the road to being The Place to be.
UB as a heritage and an ideal demands care and commitment. Those of us given the responsibility of its present condition are prepared to do our very best so that what we bequeath to the future generations will be just as good as, if not better than, what we received.