Private universities petition president over closures

University leaders from five mostly foreign universities have petitioned the President of Rwanda, Paul Kagame, over the basis on which the Rwandan Higher Education Council, or HEC, decided to close down their operations, which took effect on 20 October.

The closed institutions include Nile Source Polytechnic of Applied Arts, Sinhgad Technical Education Society Rwanda, Rusizi International University, Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology and the Open University of Tanzania.

The HEC said it was closing them due to their failure to comply with recommendations of a government audit earlier this year.

But the leaders of the affected universities told University World News they have petitioned the country’s top office over what they allege is partiality and unfairness behind the decision to force them to close.

Abdallah Nzitonda, the principal and co-founder of the Sinhgad Technical Education Society Rwanda, said the government neglected earlier agreements and rushed to cancel the institution’s licence without adequate consultation.

“We were surprised after the audit [to discover that it claimed] that we had a shortage of qualified personnel and that we had introduced unaccredited programmes, which is not true. Most of our lecturers came from India and are on a part-time basis and from the outset our programmes were accredited. The HEC was very much aware of this since the beginning,” he said.

According to the HEC, Sinhgad was only accredited to run two programmes while the institution was offering five programmes. According to Nzitonda the five programmes were complementary in the engineering department.

“Apart from the masters of business administration which other universities offer, we were also providing engineering in electricity, electronics, telecommunication and mechanical which are complementary – they go hand in hand,” he said.

The institution was employing close to 80 staff members, including lecturers and had enrolled close to 250 students in different disciplines, he said.

Nzitonda said it did not make sense financially to close down a RWF2 billion (US$2.4 million) investment in Rwanda. Neither did it make sense in terms of the country’s development agenda.

He said he is hopeful of a positive response from the president over the petition.

Initially, the HEC had given all tertiary institutions up to 13 September to address the recommendations in the previous audit or face the cancellation of their licences. The audit stemmed from a government request in November 2016 to carry out a full and detailed inspection aimed at assessing how institutions conduct their operations and how the teaching and learning process is being implemented.

Officials also sought to assess the extent to which universities were driving the national development agenda and how they fared in terms of both relevance and quality of education.
The audit team was made up of independent auditors and higher education experts from institutions across the continent. Several institutions received negative reports and recommendations on how to improve.

Those that have now been shut were given six months to respond to the audit reports, but failed to do so, according to Emmanuel Muvunyi, the council’s executive director.

Some institutions which had responded positively to the raised concerns had resumed operations under monitoring. “Others did not even bother to respond to our recommendations and that led to the revocation of their licences,” he said.

Meanwhile the closure has meant students have had to enrol in other institutions. Muvunyi said the affected universities were asked to provide students with the documents needed for them to enrol in similar programmes at other universities.

However, this has still meant inevitable disruption. “Yes, some were given those papers and others had already enrolled on other campuses during the suspension because they could not have waited any longer,” said Audace Mahoro, an MBA graduate student at the now closed Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology.

However, Mahoro said students in their final years would be particularly affected, since many had already started work on dissertation projects and research and would now need to work with a new team of supervisors and, inevitably, more money would be spent in relocating.