A mammoth sixty years in a life of an organism should have seen a lot of adventure and growth.

To the Ghanaian public servant, such a person will be the latest pensioner in town. It is expected that he or she should have subscribed to a reliable pension scheme and made huge investments in the form of children and grandchildren. Anything less than the above will mean the pensioner may have to face some neglect from the world around him or her.

His children stand to be blamed for such old age predicament regardless of how irresponsible such a parent was for not planning a good pension life. But jaws are likely to drop even more and wide if such a sexagenarian was responsible in his or her heydays by giving his or her children a good upbringing. It is the children and grandchildren who would suffer all the curses for negligence.

The recent past history of my alma mater, GIJ could be likened to the above pensioner. A mother with many kith and kins but with little to boast thereof.

During my four-year undergraduate education (and now masters), I have not seen much from the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the Institute. I witnessed very few efforts by the Student Representative Council, the Graduate Student Association, GIJ branch and very few alumni who are professionals in the media fraternity.

The Alumni body has an obvious mandate of ensuring belongingness for those who graduate from the school. But more obvious is the liaison duty they are to ensure, and this forms part of mobilizing resources to give back to the school. But I must confess, I have seen little of this body in keeping to this call.

In 2016, I headed a special SRC committee called the Research Committee. As part of its terms and references, we were to respond to the dry season of alumni support towards the student body and the school at large. We were to ensure this by collating the data of past students across all fields and to generate a contact pool for the Governing Council and the school. The idea was to survey and discover alumni who were making huge impacts in their chosen areas of endeavor, to fall on when the need arises. For instance, at the time (and even in present time), internship and sponsorship were a major bane for every SRC leadership, hence, this move was to help mitigate the situation.

Hard as we tried, we could trace the ancestry of these alumni to only 2014. The majority of the contacts we obtained were immediate past executives with a significant number being executives of the various leaderships. Regardless, we handed over the information we could glean about various alumni both recommended and those we run into.

Three years on, and the question I ask myself is “Was this document made available to subsequent SRC leadership, and if yes how useful has it being to helping establish contact with illustrious past students?”

The GRASAG as a governance body for postgraduate students often has a number of its members being old students of the school. I have seen on couple occasions, an attempt to “entice” them to come back to their alma mater. The Home-coming initiative under its rubric has become a ritual but the concept needs to move from just merrymaking and chats-over-bottles, to a more monetized venture to rig in revenue for the school.

During the Kumah-led SRC leadership, with support from the executive body, I masterminded the GIJSRC Alumni Lecture Series. One of our own, a seasoned international communications expert, Raymond Bayor, who dabbled as a former SRC President, addressed students and leaders on how to build a career outside campus even whilst on campus. A religiously affiliated NGO would say, “we managed to touch a lot of lives with this gesture”. We keep seeing these student-led seminars and workshops almost every week.

In this same leadership year, two fellow Communicators – multiple award-winning citizen vigilante, Manasseh Azure and veteran presenter (Ghana’s Opera Winfrey) and gender activist, Oheneyere Gifty Anti showed some spirit of patriotism towards the school.

Manasseh declared his intention to set up an investigative club on campus to help train more citizen vigilantes for the nation. Oheneyere Anti, on the other hand, partnered with the Women’s Commission to organize the first-ever Female Excellence awards on campus. It was a strategic occasion to award young ambitious female students, who in fact account for the majority of students in the school

However, it is a hard truth to say considering the large and quality number of products GIJ churns out yearly, the school is experiencing some neglect from its alumni. The supports I have seen do not correspond with the transformation that a pensioner GIJ wishes to see after sixty years of serving the nation and the continent. We have not even reached an Oliver Twist stage.

GIJ as a mother is proud to see its products capture and dominate the airwaves with quality content and performance, but it cringes when it comes to benefiting from the yields of these seeds.

Meanwhile, it is pleasing to see many university alumni bodies in other universities trooping in their numbers back to support their alma mater in diverse forms. Some alumni bodies of universities are building schools, clinics, laboratories, libraries, scholarship among others.

One of the recent pressing needs of the school is finances and grants. In the face of a merger with The Ghana Institute of Languages and the National Film and Television Institute, GIJ needs to be equipped to expand its infrastructure as well as position herself strategically to meet the needs of its teaching and non-teaching staff.

More so, I observe many administrative lapses and work deficiencies that would need both human and cash capital to restructuring. From limited SRC buses, few functioning logistics in various classrooms, to rather weak online data management and academic results system. The list is ‘tall’!

These do not speak well of a pensioner in excellent and professional communication in the country, and the people to be charged more for negligence are her grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

The writer (Kabu Nartey) is the 2019/2020 best graduating student in print journalism and the 2019 most promising student journalist of GIJ. He is a Kufuor Scholars Fellow.

kabunarteyme@gmail.com