Minister commends Islamic University College for making education accessible, affordable
Minister of Information, Mr Mustapha Abdul-Hamid has commended the management of the Islamic University College of Ghana (IUCG) for making university education accessible and affordable to Muslim students.
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“Many people in our Muslim communities across the country are now able to access university education due to your policy that you are here to make education accessible rather than for profit.”
Mr Abdul-Hamid gave the commendation when he stood in for the Vice President, Alhaji Dr Mahamudu Bawumia, at the 16th graduation and 18th matriculation ceremony of the IUCG last Saturday.
It was on the theme: “Making University Education Accessible to All – The Role of IUCG, the Government and Civil Society.”
Affordable education
Currently, Mr Hamid said the Islamic University College of Ghana was the only private university whose fees were “really affordable, and that is very commendable. You are doing a good work in this regard and the government commends you highly.”
“Indeed, the President recognises that education is the key to developing any nation. All the nations that we purport to emulate and want to be like have all developed not because of mineral resources but their human resource,” the minister stated.
It was the belief of the government, he added, that education ought to be made accessible to every Ghanaian from the lowest to the highest level.
Quality of graduates
Mr Abdul-Hamid further observed that in spite of the challenges facing the IUCG, it had been able to train graduates who were very competitive in the marketplace.
He added that he had had personal encounters with many graduates from the university who were of no less quality than those from the other state universities.
“What makes you unique is the fact that you underline your educational training with moral values, with which we can develop our country, rather than raw knowledge,” he posited.
The minister said that it was an indictment on all Ghanaians that the national capital, Accra, was reputed as one of the dirtiest cities in Africa or the world because of poor moral attitudes.
“It is wrong for people to eat banana, oranges, and just leave them on the streets. If we are training young men and women who really value morality and ethics, we will not have a dirty city. We encourage the Islamic University to continue to make moral training a central part of its curriculum because it is only by so doing that we can wipe out corruption and train a generation of morally upright people who are committed to the development of our country,” Mr Abdul-Hamid urged.
He charged the graduates to be innovative and creative to be able to survive in the 21st century.
Courses
Mr Abdul-Hamid noted that university education was universal and, therefore, it did not matter what course one did at a university, “what matters is the stuff you are made of and that is what employers look out for.”
“In the 21st Century, employers are no longer looking for the courses that people read in the university. They are looking for the steel and character and the integrity and the knowledge that people are imbued with,” Mr Abdul-Hamid stated.
Commendation
He commended the leadership of the school for its intake of 53 per cent males and 47 per cent females and expressed the hope that “in the next few years, you will be attaining a parity of 50 per cent male and 50 per cent female. Then you would be making a very big statement that Islamic education also has the woman at its centre.”
The government, he said, was aware of all the challenges that the school faced in offering quality education to the people and gave an assurance that the government would offer the needed support to resolve all the challenges.