COTE D IVOIRE: Northern university set to reopen in April

[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

BOUAKE, 23 Mar 2005 (IRIN) - The University of Bouake in the rebel-held north of Cote d'Ivoire is set to reopen next month almost three years after the outbreak of war forced it to close it doors and deprived thousands of youngsters of a chance of higher education, government and rebel officials said.

Dozens of new students lined up at the campus on Wednesday to enrol for the first academic year since the start of the civil war in September 2002.

"I will finally get to know what it means to be a university student," one young wannabe student told IRIN. "I have been waiting impatiently for this since I obtained my high school diploma in 2003."

The University of Bouake was founded in 1996, but closed in September 2002 as rebels invaded the northern half of Cote d'Ivoire in a bid to topple President Laurent Gbagbo. Bouake, the second largest city in the country, soon became their headquarters.

The university library was completely looted during the early days of the civil war and its books were subsequently hawked on the streets.

Shortly afterwards, the University of Bouake opened a provisional campus in the de facto capital Abidjan for the nearly 12,000 students who had fled the rebel-held north.

But those left behind in Bouake, 400 km to the north were starved of higher education opportunities.

After a UNESCO-sponsored feasibility study and an assessment mission to Bouake earlier this year, Higher Education Minister Zemogo Fofana gave the green light to reopen the original campus and guaranteed its degrees would be recognised by his ministry.

"In a way, it's reconciliation through education. If some of our former students have joined the rebellion because there was nothing else to do, they finally have the opportunity to go back to study," Sawaliho Bamba, an official from the higher education ministry told IRIN.

"We very much hope that classes can start by 26 April," he added, saying that the academic year would run to December.

Fofana said that an estimated 4,000 students who stayed in the rebel stronghold after the failed coup attempt would probably re-enrol and that he expected there to be another 700 new students.

Old students will pay 6,000 CFA (US$12) to sign up for
university classes again, while newcomers would pay 9,000 CFA (US$18)

Lecturers will travel back and forth between the Abidjan and Bouake campuses of the university, but Bamba said that most of the staff had expressed no objection to that. University officials were also considering hiring retired teachers as there had been a shortage of lecturers before the war, he added.

Bamba said that the ministry had asked the UN mission in Cote d'Ivoire (ONUCI) and the Japanese government for assistance with rehabilitating the Bouake campus, a cost he estimated at 7 billion CFA francs (US$ 14 million).

The kick-starting of higher education projects in rebel-held territory under the auspices of minister Fofana, who hails from the north and belongs to Rally of the Republicans (RDR) opposition party, contrasts with the reluctance of his fiercely anti-rebel counterpart at the Education Ministry to normalise primary and secondary school activity in the north so long as the rebels hold sway there

Many schools in the north have closed, those that are struggling to stay open have unqualified volunteers in place of the government teachers who fled south, and the Education Ministry has dragged its heels over the holding of school exams in the north.

UN officials say Education Minister Michel Amani N'Guessan, a member of President Laurent Gbagbo's Ivorian Popular Front (FPI) party, has said he will refuse to provide teachers or administrative staff for schools in the north unless the country has been reunified and the rebels disarmed.

Fofana's RDR party, on the other hand, is generally viewed as sympathetic towards the rebel movement.

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