via CIO force E/Guinea students on colleges New Zimbabwe 13/01/2015
OFFICIALS in polytechnic colleges in the country say they have been ordered to enrol students from the Equatorial Guinea for various courses at the institutions without adequate preparations and resources for the special programme.
The programme which is being coordinated by CIO officers directly from the President’s office has thrown the colleges into turmoil, according to sources.
Zimbabwe’s bilateral relations with Equatorial Guinea started in March 2004 when Zimbabwe security officers intercepted a plane full of 64 mercenaries who were en-route to the oil rich West African country ostensibly to overthrow the government of President Teodoro Obiang Nguema.
The coup plotters including their leaders were arrested and jailed before they were subsequently extradited to Equatorial Guinea where they were further imprisoned and then released.
In November last year, President Robert Mugabe attended the Turkey –Africa summit in Equatorial Guinea where the student exchange programme deal is said to have been brokered.
“Officials from the President’s office brought the students here last week. We are in a dilemma because we were not prepared for the intake as they cannot speak the English language. Apart from that, we do not have student intake in January. Our enrolment is in September,” said a senior lecturer at Bulawayo Polytechnic who strictly spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of victimisation.
Colleges said they have been forced to create a special class to accommodate the students who can only speak Spanish.
“The major challenge is that we do not have lecturers who can speak Spanish. The other problem is that some of the students have got their own special diet which we are not able to provide,” said another official.
Newzimbabwe.com is reliably informed that one of the students contacted her parents complaining about the poor coordination of the programme. The parent subsequently provided her with an air ticket to fly back home and she has since left.
Some of the students are also complaining of being forced to take courses that they had not opted for. Under the programme, more than 148 students have been enrolled under similar circumstances in various colleges throughout the country.
Meanwhile the Zimbabwe Defence Forces (ZDF) Monday deployed officers to provide services at the 2015 Africa Cup of Nations, which kicks off in Malabo, Equatorial Guinea at the weekend.
The contingent was drawn from the police, army and the CIO.
The state media said they travelled to the country at the invitation of Obiang Nguema.
COMMENTS
If we can not organise this properly then one wonders what we can do. This needs quite some ground work to have been put in place. Some of us went to Russian to study without knowing Russian lunguage but everything had been thought out and well planned in adv ance such that in 6 months we were able to speak, read and write the language. We continued to master the language for a further 6 months with the introduction of technical subjects and after a year we were enrolled in universities and technical colleges where we commenced our degree and diploma courses with the Russian lunguage as the medium of instruction. I was in a class of about 20 with only 4 foreigners.