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| Prof Justus Mbae, Immediate Former VC of CUEA delivers his Farewell Speech |
Prof. Justus Mbae, the immediate former Vice Chancellor of the Catholic University of Eastern Africa (CUEA) has applauded the University Council members for being “resolute, adamant and focused on what needed to be done” and for pushing him and his administration to move in the direction they intended CUEA to go.
In his farewell speech during the installation of Rev. Prof. Stephen Mbugua as new Vice Chancellor, Prof. Mbae further thanked the Council for providing the University with the much needed expertise and personnel that has seen the institute enhance the process of transformation. This, he said, has made CUEA get off from the status of a dying Catholic Institution to one that is slowly but steadily reclaiming its glorious status in the academic sphere.
“The last few years have been a time of turbulence and extreme hardship not only for CUEA but also for many private and public universities in Kenya, which are also struggling to remain a float in the face of unprecedented changes in the High Education sector,” he admitted.
He also added that the challenges his administration has faced in the last three years are well known and so too are the difficulties and the painful decisions they have had to take over time, some of which like the staff reduction that affected not only individual workers but the whole CUEA family and its dependents.
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| Prof Mbae receives token of appreciation from CUEA Chancellor Rt. Rev. Charles Kasonde |
“Equally painful was the closure of campuses and institutional structures that took place in in the process,” he observed.
Nonetheless, he commended a the University committees that have done tremendous job in an effort to turn around the University situation as directed by the Council. These included the Phase I and II Restructuring Committees; the Committee for the Accreditation of the Faculty of Law by the Commission for Legal Education; the Committee for Review of the University Strategic Plan; the Committee on closure of campuses, the College Assurance Department and Transition to the new ISO Standard; the Counselling Centre for Transforming Individual Students through Peer Counselling; the Think-Tank of our values and Catholic identities - now university Ethics Committee; and several other committees coordinated by University linkages as well as various disciplinary committees.
Prof. Mbae also disclosed that over the period which spans for nine years, he has been at CUEA as a lecturer, Deputy Vice Chancellor, Director and Vice Chancellor, he came to realization of three different groups at the University, those that have contributed to building the Institution and those that are dedicated to destroying CUEA’s reputation.
“I have learnt that there is a very small team of very dedicated individuals who love the University more than they love themselves. I have also observed that there is another team bigger in size, that does not really seem to care too much about what happens to the institution; then there are those who would readily join the enemies in bashing and destroying the reputation of this our institution - even volunteering to give out some damaging information so as to fuel the fight against the University and her good reputation. And then there is the majority of our members that are in a neutral team - neither committed to fighting the institution nor to building it, and that is our problem,” he said ,arguing that there is need to win more of CUEA staff to join the first group.
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