Announcements

Corruption has been defeated at the University of Sierra Leone (USL) following a damning investigative report about the running of the university.
The report highlighted major procedural breaches and financial impropriety. The findings of the report have rocked the academic community.

As a way of fighting back, the core group of university officials who were implicated have launched a scathing attack in the media against the Minister of Technical and Higher Education, Dr Ramatulai Wurie.
Dr Wurie, a distinguished academic and one of the best-performing cabinet ministers, has been praised for her bravery to unearth corruption at the highest level in the university. Her admirers have praised her tenacity in the face of the brutal smear campaign against her reputation.
A long-time university administrator told this medium anonymously that: “Corruption has finally been defeated at the university, thanks to Minister Wurie. For a very long time now these people thought they had a free pass to do what they wanted. The scale of the corruption revelations is extremely shocking.”
Some of the top figures who were implicated in the investigative and sub-committee report are the former Vice Chancellor and Principal, the current Deputy Vice-Chancellor of College of Medicine and Allied Health Sciences (COMAHS), the then Finance Director, the then Registrar and the current Business Centre Manager.
The report is littered with administrative breakdown, financial mismanagement and blatant procurement violations. In one of many instances, there is purchase of a vehicle worth US$126,000 for the Vice Chancellor and Principal, raising questions about this expensive vehicle being a necessity or a way to use university funds to fund luxury for the then Vice Chancellor and Principal.
On the human resources front, the report confirmed that retired and exited staff were still on payroll. There were reportedly no consistent processes for staff induction, performance appraisal, or even defined job descriptions—creating a culture of inefficiency, bloated staffing, and unchecked authority.
Concerned experts have expressed their fears of how this could have possibly affected the university’s standing globally, if there was no efficiency system in place to measure performance.
Minister Wurie has broken the stranglehold these few individuals had on the university, and these independent reports have vindicated her bold action last year to go as far as dissolving the University Court. After consultation with the Chancellor, she appointed an Acting Vice Chancellor and Principal to restore order and clarity. While the move faced criticism at the time, subsequent reports—particularly from internally established sub-committees—have confirmed that her intervention was not only appropriate, but necessary.
Insiders within the former administration say the former Vice Chancellor and Principal and some of his former senior officials are angry at how they were exposed, hence the need to resort to the current strategy of smearing her name in public.
In the coming days and weeks, there will be several publications detailing the extent of the fraud and corruption under the former university administration.