University should be “laboratory for solving problems” – Nyusi

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University should be “laboratory for solving problems” – Nyusi

8:49 CAT | 27 Jun 2016

Notícias / President Nyusi during his visit to UEM on Thursday, June 23 2016

Mozambican President Filipe Nyusi on Thursday challenged the Eduardo Mondlane University (UEM), the oldest institution of higher education in the country, to act as a laboratory capable of influencing economic and human development.

The university, he said, should be based on the ambitions and concerns of Mozambicans. It should thus be more than an establishment of education, and should transform itself into a laboratory for solving the country’s problems.

Nyusi launched this challenge during his first visit as President to various UEM faculties, in response to an invitation from the Vice-Chancellor’s office.

He praised the quantitative growth of the university, but was less than pleased at the quality of some of the buildings, notably the Engineering Faculty, where he had been a student in the 1980s. He thought there had been little improvement since then, and the premises were cramped for the number of students in the Faculty.

But he was pleased to receive details about research underway in the engineering and veterinary science faculties. The results of such research, he believed, could be important for dealing with, and perhaps eliminating, some of the problems the country faced in nutrition, livestock and civil construction.

He hoped to see the university more oriented towards research, through the promotion of programmes which could solve the country’s problems.

Nyusi recognized the key role the UEM has played in providing the country with skilled cadres. “The doctors, the agronomists, even government members – more than 60 or 65 per cent of the ones I have – came from here”, he said.

He asked the university community “what can be done so that we emerge rapidly from the problems Mozambicans face, which have been made worse by badly conceived debts”.

This was Nyusi’s first public admission that the debts inherited from the previous government are worsening the country’s situation. He was referring to the government-guaranteed loans contracted by the companies EMATUM (Mozambique Tuna Company), MAM (Mozambique Assets Management) and Proindicus (intended to sell maritime security services). The loans amount to more than two billion dollars, or around 20 per cent of the country’s total foreign debt.

During his visit, Nyusi inaugurated a second Educational Complex on the UEM campus, and a university clinic. These installations cost about 300 million meticais (4.8 million US dollars, at current exchange rates).

Source: AIM