Beautiful and useful memorials

This past week I have been part of two memorials whose stories deserve to be recounted over and over again.

Congestion in dormitories and residential halls in boarding schools and universities has been very much in the news recently.

I can testify that Adisadel College has an extra 150 beds to ease congestion and overcrowding, thanks to the addition of a three-storey, six-unit dormitory block to their stock of student accommodation on the campus.

On Friday and Saturday, I was in Cape Coast for the inauguration and handing  over to Adisadel College of the Atu Mould House, a truly magnificent and modern dormitory block.

On Friday night we had a candlelit procession and vigil that ended in front of the newly constructed dormitory, and when the first group of Adisco students entered the building for a sneak preview, it was obvious, the students were mightily impressed.

“Charlie, it is like a hotel!”, they were telling each other as they came out of the building.

Those who knew Atu Mould, in whose memory the dormitory block has been constructed, would be glad to hear the students proclaim the buildings, the furnishings and finishing as being of hotel standards.

Atu would not have settled for anything less. 

Interest

I suspect I have to declare a personal interest at this stage.

Atu was my son that I shared with his mother, Sati Ocran.

Atu had enjoyed his time in Adisadel College where he attended secondary school and made some lifelong friends.

The Santa 89, his year group is made up of a truly dynamic and thoughtful young men who have demonstrated a lot of affection since the sudden death of Atu in November 2020.

Atu had made quite a success of his business ventures and become well-known for his generosity.

Since he had said he would build a dormitory block for Adisadel, his mother Sati decided it would be a good way to commemorate him; build what he had promised to do, as a way of saying thank you to a school that had provided Atu with some of the happiest times of his life and given him many faithful friends.

The only caveat was to make sure the project is delivered according to Atu’s very exacting standards.

There are no crooked lines, no corners were cut, only top grade materials were purchased and used in the finishing and furnishing.

I understand that usually in building dormitories for schools, the allocation is made of one toilet to 20 students; well, in the Atu Mould House, it is one toilet to six students.

To make the design the consultant for the project spoke to Adisco students, past and present, to teachers and to Atu’s Mum, Sati, to take in Atu’s own ideas about how he wanted a dormitory to be.

Maybe, one day, all dormitories would be built to the same specification as the Atu Mould House with individual cupboards for everyone in the room,  spacious bathrooms, solid and beautiful furnishing, a reading room and a visitor’s lounge named after a five-star hotel, Labadi Beach hotel.

Aha, therein lies a story, as the signage states on the visitors’ lounge at the dormitory, Atu had spent the last four years of his life living at the Labadi Beach hotel, so what better acknowledgement than to name the visitor’s lounge after his last home.

I have no doubt that there would be a scramble on campus to get a space at the Atu Mould House.

I just hope that the students who were at the handing over ceremony on Saturday heard the speech made by Atu’s brother, Lee Tandoh Ocran, especially the bit about Atu’s obsession with cleanliness.

I hope everyone who stays in that dormitory will forever accept a personal responsibility to keep everything clean.

No costs were spared to get top quality material for the fittings, extra drainage was provided not just for the grounds around the Atu Mould House but to resolve the age-old drainage problems that had bedevilled the two dormitories near this new one.

There is an extra attraction with the sinking of a borehole that went to extraordinary depths to get guaranteed, good quality and plentiful supply of water.

A beautiful lawn has been planted and beautiful decorative plants are in place.

That is how Atu would have wanted it and nobody was going to risk anything that would be second rate.

It is a thing of beauty.       
 
Quadrangle

Earlier in the week on Tuesday, I had been at a ceremony in Legon where the quadrangle at the back of the Balme Library at the University of Ghana was officially named the Samuel Kenneth Aboah Recreational Quadrangle.

Those who are not conversant with the layout of the Legon campus, need only take a look at the back of the 5-cedi note and there is the quadrangle I am referring to which has been named after Samuel Kenneth Aboah.

Sam Aboah, or SAMBUS, as he was widely known from the name of his business, was into computers and everything technology. Let me declare an interest here too; Sam Aboah was my friend.

The first time I heard of the term, GPS (Global Positioning System), it was from him and he operated from the basis that everyone must know about computers.

He served as a member of the University of Ghana Council between the years 2001 to 2008 and as the Minister of State for Tertiary Education.

I worked with him on various projects, the most memorable being him chairing the Standing Joint Negotiating Committee of all the then six public universities.

I think we can safely say that the terms and conditions of service we ended up with for university teachers under the famous five-year road plan was seen as transformational at the time.

The other significant project Sam led was to chair the committee that negotiated what turned out to be the mobilisation of the largest credit facility by a consortium of banks in the Ghana banking community to a public institution to construct four new halls of residence, now called the UGEL Halls, to ease congestion.

We were very proud of that too.

The recreational quadrangle, now named after Sam Aboah, was his personal pet project that he funded fully.

He conceived it as a special facility where staff and students can converge and share ideas in a convivial and pristine environment.

He left nothing to chance in the design and long-term survival and provided a borehole to ensure there would be water for the plants in the quadrangle.

It is worth mentioning that Sam Aboah was not an alumnus of the University of Ghana.

He went to Princeton in the USA but he dedicated a lot of his time, energies and resources to Legon and individuals who attended the university.

Ten years ago Sam Aboah died at age 54.

His fingerprints and footprints are still all over the University of Ghana and I was really proud to join his family at the ceremony on Tuesday at which the Vice Chancellor officially named the quadrangle after him.