Dear 5- Years Ago Graduate,
I write from the comfy chair of my air-conditioned office in response to your comment published on peacefmonline.com dated the 10th of December, 2015.
Graduate, many times I have failed to pick up my pen in rebuttal to several of these malevolent pieces for the reason that their contents have spelt out nothing but lies and misinformation. Am sorry yours is no exception.
Do not be deceived. This reply has only become necessary since the platform on which you have your comment posted has a very wide and great following. It would be sad if not sinful to sit down and watch a population as huge as that of peacefmonline.com’s regular readers cuckolded this cheaply.
As Phineas T. Barnum puts it, “you can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all the people all the time”.
Let’s just get down to brass tacks. It is becoming increasingly heart-breaking per my experience and interactions with students how blame is laid at the doorstep of the Students’ Representative Council every now and then without any proper justifications and factual evidence.
That is not to say that the only recognised student body empowered to seek the welfare of students be made immune to chastisement, no, for if that were so then the very duty for which we have been made council to perform would have no meaning.
Bellying up to the bar, it is true that reopening of school was delayed due to infrastructural projects. On the contrary it is blatantly a tall tale to say that the school failed to communicate this to students.
The school’s official website was updated to reflect such while notices were posted on campus with students who were engaged in internships on campus encouraged to inform fellow students about the uncertainty.
Whatever hustle and bustle that came with the school’s postponement of reopening was for the good and safety of students. When construction was at its latter stages and pieces of wooden and metallic boards, nails, and other objects with the potential of causing accidents to students glared widely in the face, which was the safer and wiser decision to make as a school’s management, trusted with the lives of several innocent children of our dear country? Postponement or the inconvenience? Shame on your sorrowful bias judgements!
Further, students have been invited to a modern way of registering for school, the online registration system and there is no denying that it is a good initiative.
You inquire what the IT guys, as you choose to call them had been doing since the vacation, brace your eyes.
The IT guys were busily computing the names, index numbers, addresses, telephone contact numbers, date of births, town and country of birth, emails, nationality, marital status, admission dates, gender, class group and level, programme, total number of courses offered for the semester, and a host other technical online information of each of close to 3,000 yes, 3,000 students of the Ghana Institute of Journalism.
The IT guys were busily conferring with technical staff of the Fidelity Bank, the schools bankers as to the measures to adopt to enable a smooth reflection of fees paid into their accounts on the registration system.
The IT guys were effectively working with the Accounts Office of the school regards methods and processes to assure management of students’ payment of their fees while being able to have access to the registration system devoid of any fraudulent transactions by both student and management. And all this they had to do in less than 3 months.
Well, to you as it has always been with critics your sort, these may be no excuses for it is their job as technicians, but one needs no expert to affirm that not even the most skilled of professionals can work within certain strained time limits. Why are doctors unable to save accident victims when they have lost too much blood? Indeed, some situations are just helpless.
But for the work these IT guys have done, it would be unfair and heartless for any individual to simply reckon with disappointment and blame the challenges that the online registration system has posed, for its accompanying workload has been nothing but daunting. Let us allow integrity and a sense of kind feeling to influence our opinions.
Computers are machines and as such are not perfect. Earlier this year, the US Copyright Office’s electronic system failed to respond for almost a week costing the office an estimated 650,000 in lost fees and causing headaches for approximately 12,000 customers.
As it turned out, the outage was part of a bigger computer failure at the Library of Congress, the federal agency that oversees the national library, a major player in the global digital economy. This is the world’s most economically developed country facing challenges with computer systems, dear graduate.
As if that is not enough, citizens of Canada had trouble accessing the online voter registration service when they went to the polls to elect national leaders prompting many of these citizens to question Elections Canada, the central office tasked with administering electoral exercise of Canada. It is safe to conclude from the foregoing that online verification and registration challenges are no new phenomena to our world.
In a country where its citizens are quick only to point out the bad and never the good of what fellow citizens do, it is comments of the kind such as yours that arise to deceive the public.
Dear 5-years-ago graduate, did the very notes that taught you ways of conducting research not enlighten you about fairness and objectivity in journalistic writing? Spare our blushes!
Where were your five-years-ago GIJ notes when you failed to take the pain to contact any of the executives of the council for their stance concerning what measures they had or hoped to take regards the issue at hand?
Where is (sic) the SRC when students are (sic) complaining bitterly about being mistreated on campus?
This is absolutely not true. Mistreatment in what particular way? Know that no student of GIJ has reported any case of mistreatment to our office but if any student feels aggrieved by mistreatment, am sure the police would be ready enough to hear their case. The SRC cannot wake up to confront anyone when it has not been notified or witnessed a single student suffer mistreatment from management.
Where is (sic) the SRC when lots of students are (sic) halted for about an hour because authorities failed to account for those who paid their fees and those who have (sic) not?
Who says the council has sat down stand-offish and watched aloof as issues with challenges of the online registration unfolded?
5-years-ago-graduate, where were you when His Excellency Romeo Adzah forfeit an hour of his examination time to ensure students who wrongly fell victim to the computer system indicating they owed fees were given rooms to write their papers?
Where were you when His Excellency intervened for students who truly owed fees to be pardoned and allowed to write their papers after the students had promised to settle their fees or face the necessary consequences?
In your interview with students on campus, perhaps you should have probed further and spoken to some of these students, to ask why they were allowed to write several of their papers despite their indebtedness to the school.
And these are just three of hundreds of students who have had GIJ temper justice with mercy. Could Father Christmas even had done better?
That was subjective interviewing you did there graduate. Analysing your attitude towards the issues nonetheless, I strongly believe you have forgotten the tenets of your training in GIJ quite too soon and it’s sad because it’s been only five years.
I dare any student of the institute to tell us whether he or she was refused to write any of his examination papers despite having fully settled their fees in full. The issue in contention was only to provide proof of your payment and you were good to go.
Let me hasten to add though that there was no communication to any effect directing students to only pay their fees and go ahead with their registration online as that has never been the case with the school’s fees payment and registration procedures, even during the manual paper and pen times.
Neither the SRC nor management in its many communiques had instructed students of a new arrangement, therefore how you came by your assertions beats my imagination.
But if am being untruthful, I would be glad to accept the shame if you furnish me with proper and correct details of either the SRC or management’s releases that gave any such directives.
As I write, I am tempted to concede that these allegations are merely anything but your own assumptions. Our country is faced with people who describe things as ‘half empty’ when a better ‘half full’ can be used and it is clear you are one of such who leads its band.
To say however, that management is by the minutest extent defensible from frustrating non-owing students from writing their papers due to such arrangements is nothing but hypocritical and cruel.
I believe, these students without any comprise deserve an apology for their time wasting and the stress dealt them, especially when an end of semester examination lay minutes in waiting.
In other issues, I am further depressed to read your comment on the subject of the first class brouhaha of the latest graduates of the school. In disputing your ignorance let me borrow Tawiah Benjamin’s explanation in his discussion of Professor Aryeetey’s comments that a University of Ghana first class were as good as a third class in other universities.
He argues, “first class students did not only meet the required grade point; they demonstrated higher levels of intellectual curiosity and displayed brilliant flashes of thoughtful insight when they were challenged to a contest of ideas”.
I cannot exclusively tell whether there were other forms of examinations judged on the merits of these students to warrant their classes but such matters can be saved for discussion on another day.
The underlying truth of the matter is per whatever means used to account for the marks of these students, the deserving first class ones are just those were been awarded. Nothing else.
Otherwise if it were a deliberate act of misdeed or callousness as you sought to disgustingly establish, why did management not give all the students a second lower or third class to truly perpetrate their bad acts?
Where was the council when students’ grades were reduced because management was suspicious of attempts by lecturers to pass their students?
We were evaluating the facts and complaints of these students to inform our decisions of any necessary steps to take. After having rummaged the dissenting submissions, we are informed that the grading of students for the first time, was this year raised by 10% from the previous 70% to 80% for qualification for an ‘A’.
This is in stark paradox to your charge that 10% of the results of students were rather reduced in the grades of some subjects of the students. Shame on your sorrowful white lies!
Of course such a lift in grading would definitely mean fewer students earning first class honours compared to previous badges but this is the same procedure used for all students and I repeat all students. In this case the 5 students can be said to be those extremely good students among the badge.
Does it mean the students were lazy to study or the lecturers are (sic) rather not doing their best to help students get their academic distinctions?
Either way, no university has and ever would record complete attendance of lecturers in class, however that is no excuse for failure. When others have made it with their course outlines only as guide for studies what acquittal is there for the others?
How come just 5 people could graduate with first class honours while the rest complete with second class upper, second class lower and third class degrees?
Where is it stated 5-year-ago-graduate that there be a definite number of students to graduate with first class honours. Is it your suggestion that students be bestowed first class honours even when they do not deserve it just to beef up the woeful numbers?
Why the complaints for this particular badge? I do not intend to cast aspersions on the intelligence of the graduates but how extremely well at all have they performed to warrant an argument about their being cheated for suspicious grades.
If even it were true that they performed as astonishingly well as it is being peddled, how was it that the 5 first class students did not fall short of the skepticism allegedly exhibited by management?
With the school having not received any such allegations before, is it your case that they have proved the most remarkably performed crop of students of GIJ since the school’s establishment? The answers to these questions cannot be obviously disputed.
I agree, the lecturers must also take blame for the students’ under-performance, hitherto, it would be nothing but untruthful and bamboozling to hint that management deliberately failed students when they indeed deserved to have first class honours.
And yes, per simple analogy there were no other exceptionally brilliant students who should have made first class than those who were awarded.
In all your ballyhoo all the same, I take solace in the fact that you have mentioned that the purported facts in your story are that from hearsay, bravo!
At least, you have been sincere with us on that one. But I guess you have lost that part of your notes that taught you at GIJ that truthfulness never ought to be bargained in the practice and how to evaluate sources of information to determine their credibility.
The Ghana Journalists Association (GJA) code of ethics makes provision for the protection of confidential sources and not sources derived from hearsay, unconfirmed facts, one-sided conclusions, assumptions and unfair generalisations.
Dear graduate, I am baffled to think that you are an alumna of GIJ because for my close to 2 years on campus, training in the school has never promoted the ideals of yellow journalism. In fact, responsible journalism does not teach one to hide identity for uncovering truths if indeed they believed it so otherwise what would be the point of journalism at all?
You know, it is for people of your kind that Criss Jami in his book Killosophy wrote, ”a rumour is a social cancer. It is difficult to contain and it rots the brains of the masses. However, the real danger is that so many find rumours enjoyable. That part cause the infection. And in such cases where the rumour is only partially made up of truth it is difficult to pinpoint exactly where the information may have gone wrong. It is passed on and on until some brave soul questions its validity; that brave soul refuses to bite the apple and let the apple eat him”.
Some of us would not kowtow to deceit and lies, we fail to bite your apples.
Don’t worry! No one in GIJ has the luxury of time to search your file for your identity.
We are all busy studying hard to earn the much cherished first class honours that Eva Kupuolo and her colleagues worked so hard for. We can’t take chances, bear in mind a grade ‘A’ is now 80%and above.
However, I have in my mind with no shred of doubt that the fire you borrowed from Adom TV and Asempa FM’s Songo has not quenched.
Please accept its hot flames to unprofessionally burn that concealed identity of yours.
Y3nbr3 y3. K)da kraa!
c
Yours truly,
BarimaNana
Vice President
GIJ-SRC
Disclaimer: the article this piece responds to published on peacefmonline.com can be read here
http://comment.peacefmonline.com/pages/features/201512/263471.php
barimanana.wordpress.com 