Douala: University Lectures In Borrowed Structures
With a student population of over 45,000, financial resources have been allocated to construct two new structures, one amphitheatre and a building for pedagogy.
The University of Douala has a very limited and aging physical infrastructure insufficient for the university’s current, much less its future, needs. In 1993 the university recognized the necessity of making a substantial institutional commitment to infrastructure in order to achieve vital academic objectives. The situation today bespeaks of a clear missing link between this noble objective and ground reality in Douala. This reality might have shifted with time due to inherent evolution difficulties, according to an official of the university.
The state-run university is exhausting the opportunity of refurbishing abandoned buildings once used by Matgenie at Ndokoti as storehouse to offer lectures to at least 1,200 students. Classrooms have been wrenched from Government Primary School, GPS, Deido for university lectures. Today, the latter plays host to all tutorial classes offered by First Cycle of the university. A student we contacted on GPS campus on September 20 fumed at the incumbent difficulty posed by a mixture of lectures for primary school pupils and university students who have to attend classes on the same campus. Matgenie and GPS Deido serve faculty, staff, and students as a temporary useful alternative but a good way to postpone solutions to infrastructural problems. By concentrating its resources on core competencies and responding to new priorities, especially with the creation of new Faculties simply pushes the problem of insufficient lecture halls to another generation, while limiting current student intake and the addition of new institutions. Institutions of the university must build and maintain robust, comprehensive superstructures to provide the foundation for services required today and into the next century.
Douala University is attempting solutions to the problem by allocating financial resources to construct two new structures at Logbessou to integrate the Faculties of Industrial Engineering and Medicine created way back in 2006. On its main campus is being constructed a 1400-capacity amphitheatre and a pedagogic building, “superstructures commenced in December 2009 expected to be completed for effective use by December 20, 2010. Some 1.3 billion FCFA has been vested on the structures,” said a technician at the construction site.
Christopher JATOR
