The Founder of the African University College of Communications (AUCC), Kojo Yankah, has been explaining the purpose for which the University of Cape Coast was established and its transformation over the years.
The renowned educationist, speaking to Samuel Attah-Mensah on FootPrints on Citi TV said the University of Cape Coast was specifically established in 1962 to train science teachers who would have in turn trained the technicians needed to fuel the country’s industrial drive.
“The University of Cape Coast was founded as a university for science education. The first principal was called Professor Bakum. This story is missing from our history books, and I deeply regret it. This is something we have missed talking about because the idea of Dr. Kwame Nkrumah setting up the university was to train science teachers. He had the vision of industrialization, and he had the vision of Ghana going scientific, so all teachers that the University of Cape Coast was to produce were to be science teachers.”
He revealed that deliberate efforts were made by the first president of the country, Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, who paid slightly higher salaries to teachers who graduated from the university, all in hopes of encouraging enrolment.
“The thing about the University of Cape Coast was that if you came out from the University and because you had done science education, your salary range was higher than the one who had gone to the University of Ghana, Legon.”
He also bemoaned the neglect of the exclusive training of science teachers which he said if the authorities of the university had not transitioned from their initial mandate, Ghana would have been competing highly with its peers globally.
“Imagine that if the University of Cape Coast produces even 200 science teachers every year since 1963, this country with the information age, the technology age, we would have gone far because the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology was established to train the technicians, but you needed the teachers to train the technicians which the University of Cape Coast was training.”
He was also deeply concerned about the conversion of the country’s polytechnics into full-fledged universities that do a lot of courses in the humanities.
