A Tanzania university college spent 13 years without students

By Our Correspondent, MUSOMA Tanzania

Tanzania’s Mwalimu Nyerere University of Agriculture and Technology in Butiama district, Mara region has been without students for 13 years.

The college, which has lecturers and the head of the college but no student was ever enrolled at the college during the entire period.

This has been revealed after the Standing Committee of the Parliament, Services and Community development visited and inspected the development of the college which was established in 2010.

The members of the committee seemed surprised and others were angered by the state of the higher learning institution.

"The Chancellor of the college and your staff, I feel so sorry for you. You have been tortured for a very long time by being placed in Butiama for all those years without students. This is torture," said Ms Husna Sekiboko, a member of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Services.

For her part, special seats lawmaker, Salome Makamba said that the situation created a big loss, revealing that a professor was sent to the college to become the Vice Chancellor of the college and retired after eight years without a single lecture delivered.

"Therefore, the college administration should think about it. People are given a budget for expenses and salaries every month and yet the college has never provided services..." she said, noting she was so disappointed with the situation.

The MJNUAT is a new public institution which was formally established in 2012. It has its headquarters is in Butiama district, Mara region the birthplace of Tanzania’s first president, Julius Nyerere.

According to the university’s website, the institution aimed at being at the centre stage of agricultural transformation in Tanzania; the aim that seem to have failed.

It also had dream to be a regional and global player in innovative and societal responsive Agricultural Education and Training (AET) and to achieving the goal through embracement of the concepts of the Third or Fourth Generation University which, in part, are in line with the views of late Father of the Nation, Mwalimu Julius K. Nyerere that were expressed when inaugurating another agricultural University on 26^th September 1984.