Senior Lecturer at KNUST Department of Chemistry, Dr. Richard Tia
It has emerged that lecturers with the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) are taking monies from relatives as loans to buy equipment to carry research works.
"I have a colleague who took a loan from his wife to buy the basic equipment he needed to start his research program", a Senior Lecturer at KNUST Department of Chemistry revealed.
"They employ you as a scientist in the university and they give you an office (if you are lucky), a white board marker and a duster and they wish you good luck", Dr. Richard Tia stated.
The Senior Lecturer responded to the supposed damning claims made by veteran journalist and Managing Editor of the Insight newspaper Kwesi Pratt that over fifty years of establishment, KNUST is unable able to produce a solar panel or provide any solution for the country’s energy problems.
"What happens to those of us who don’t have rich wives, or have no wives at all?”, Dr. Richard Tia quizzed in a write up.
According to the him, the way a university is set up, it is almost impossible for the institution to be the driving force of the setting up of companies.
"So we train the students, endow them with the technical know-how and send them into the world, what happens there then is a function of the business environment of the country and the continent and not necessarily on the quality of training we give them"
"I am not sure I know what Mr. Kwesi Pratt wants to see to know that KNUST can make a solar cell", he fumed.
"Our job is to create the knowledge based on which the solar cell fabrication will be done, and then in partnership with investors, the patent holders set up companies to do their business", Dr. Richard Tia pointed out.
