My day started on a high today. I read on LinkedIn that Professor (Mrs.) Nana Aba Amfo had been unanimously appointed to a second term of office as Vice-chancellor (VC).

Depending on my mood, I call her: a friend, a sister, or many times, both. For many public sector employees, they would rather not be called that, or so some have told me. The association can have implications in the eyes of the principalities and powers that run our country, not all always desirable. But who car

Trying to meet Nana Aba for the first time was much more difficult than meeting her. People, many of them, gave me the run around. Did I expect them to just call the boss and say: “Yaw Nsarkoh wants to speak to you!” They were even more surprised when I said, I did. So eventually, I found her number and sent her a text message. She responded almost immediately, and made the time, in an excruciating schedule, to see me. When we first spoke, she was in between meetings, in Sunyani. But she squeezed time for me, ample time. Indeed, generous time, and she was fully present.

The VC looked downcast as I told her how she had been made to look inaccessible by some of her colleagues. Nana Aba is nothing of the sort; in my experience – and that is all I have – she is firm but friendly and respectful, very professional but also very unassuming. Steady in temperament, never ruffled and ever calm. I am neither an academic nor a financier, but here she was, very willing to listen and help. And she did give me such help, over and above my expectations.

But not before we had had a hilarious conversation. I grew up on the University of Ghana campus, at Legon. This is where Nana Aba is now VC. Therefore she is a VC as vice-chancellor, but also, in a very real way, as my Village Chief. That my parents were both academics at Legon, at some point, makes me one of what Makarere University Dons in Uganda, once called the “biological children of the university.” So I regaled her with tales from my childhood. Though a biological child of the university, I was never a legal student of it; the closest I came to that was being a pupil at the University’s Primary School (UPS).

Childhood holds many memories for most people. In my case, many of them very fond. For Legon, though we did not know and appreciate it fully then, was as idyllic and whole as it gets. And that is a benchmark to anywhere in the world, at the time. When we were at the university’s primary school, there was God, then the VC, followed quite closely by our headteacher – the president or head of state of the Republic of Ghana, in our young minds, came somewhere much lower in the food chain. After all the powerful professors, the registrar, the chief finance officer, the university librarian and a few others. In our little worlds, the VC was the link between heaven and earth.

This VC was always a man - in those days, we thought an old man! For anything above forty was very old to us – never mind that many of us now say we are young, a few years shy of three score, or even more. The VC lived in a simple but elegantly designed piece of real estate. To our minds, the Vice-chancellor’s Lodge was our White House. Its architecture as an expression of poetry in construction and design. Perched atop a hill, right next to the Great Hall, overlooking the city of Accra with a regal air. Who born dog! Who say man no dey!

It was this residence that first made me think heaven was worth striving for. In my father’s house are many mansions meant, in those days of innocence, there were many places like this (VC’s Lodge) in heaven. So, heaven had to be a cool place. If I was lucky enough, and I got there, even I may end up in one, with my school friends. The world was a simple place back then, my classmates from UPS 1980 and I agree on this. Heaven, we convinced each other, was a place where at Christmas, there was lots of Gem Biscuits and Muscatella! There was no way we were going to miss out.  Five decades after, many of us still get excited at the mere mention of these treats.

How times change! When I go to Legon these days, everything seems to have shrunk over the years. The residences our parents lived in no longer seem like the palatial spaces that could accommodate, what seemed like, hundreds of high energy and commodious little children, running around, turning things upside down and creating hell-on-earth, as our heaven.

 I have been to my Class Two classroom, looked at the chairs and desks we used back then, and thought to myself: if I was once that small once, I should not be this tall now, in under two-hundred years. How on earth did we sit on those chairs, were we ever that tiny? But then I remember that before Class Two, at the school’s nursery, we had small raffia mats which we lay on to rest. Which must mean we were once even smaller than we were in Class Two. That was all we needed – a mat, while we would be told stories about the unique mysteries of the universe (or so we thought!), by our teachers, and our delicious hot chocolate drinks would be served. Heaven was right there on those mats!

The university’s main cafeteria had concrete steps, where during our athletics competitions we had to do an ominous battle. This place was a kind of popular amphitheatre for student movements, there their leaders sometimes stood and addressed them, for whatever purposes. In Class Two, we were once so small, that it was more scary than mountain climbing to scale those steps; for, they had gaps in them which we thought we could fall through. So, I remember now, that we had to crawl – gingerly, cautiously, with trepidation – to get past them, just so we could get to the chilled water dispensers.

Today some of those scared children of yesterday are judges of the supreme court – with powers to sentence people to death! Acorns do grow into oak trees, eventually! Others from then even dare to harbour presidential ambitions, fortunate that there were no smartphones then, to contradict their current claims to courage.Whenever Nana Aba asked me about an Emeritus Professor, as we first spoke, I could rattle tomes about him or her – which department they were in, which sport they played, the car they used back in the day, and more. Sometimes even famous lectures they had delivered. But when she asked me about the current faculty, I was lost. So she wondered aloud: “are you an old man or a middle-aged man!”

While I laughed, I really was sure that I was not an octogenarian or more – which as I have aged, has become my view of old. At forty-two, I thought my late father was very old. At fifty-six, we call ourselves young men. A bunch of kids, hearing I left primary school in 1980, shrieked in horror: that was in the ancient days!  But then what am I? When did I grow so old, that for the first time in my life, my mates and I are now older than the VC in Legon, and I call her, factually, my junior in years? Wow! I am, for the very first time in human history, older than “the old (wo)man in the VC’s Lodge!” For me, that is Nana Aba’s greatest distinguishing feature. I leave the rest of the honours to academics and true scholars to shower and describe. I am not capable and do not pretend to be. I am just very proud of what she has achieved for herself.

This is a tough job, sometimes lonely. Such as when the president, sitting in Jubilee House, keeps hinting that he would not mind you changing the name of the university to honour his grand-uncle, J.B. Danquah, for whatever reasons. But she knows how to keep her focus and just smile. I wish she and the university the very best, in what is not an easy time for keeping up standards of excellence and quality in scholarship.

 Congratulations Nana Aba, the best is yet to come. Keep moving!

Yaw Nsarkoh,
20 December 2024.