AMECEA: CUEA Vice Chancellor Challenges Faculty of Law to be the best
By Pamela Adinda
The Vice Chancellor of the Catholic University of Eastern Africa Prof Justus Mbae has challenged the Faculty of Law to strive to remain the top Faculty of Law in the country, find ways of resource mobilization for self-sustainability and focus more on mentoring students now that the faculty has been accredited for the next five years.
He was speaking during the celebrations of the granting of License to the Faculty of Law by the Council of Legal Education. “We thank God for bringing us this far. In April last year when the news broke out after we had just been inspected and the verdict was that unless we do a number of things, there was going to be shut down, everybody panicked, the parents, the students and even the staff; but thank God that we managed to live and tell the tale,” he said.
“To say that the anxiety was palpable is an understatement, however, the management was very clear and the administration was very dedicated, therefore all we needed to do was to meet the requirements by addressing the issues that were raised. And I must confess that it was not an easy task especially when it came to resources.”
It is against this backdrop that the Vice Chancellor insists that the faculty must understand that resources will be required. “The expectation from the faculty and I know they are up to it is to help in creating resources that will then go into building the faculty,” he said. He further challenged the lecturers to not only teach law but more importantly they journey with the students they teach by mentoring them.
He took cognizance of the fact that the process has made the university learn some very important lessons that we never need to get out of status, we have to keep in status. That the university needs to maintain and even improve on what it now has and in doing so the university and the faculty is being charged with the responsibility to make the faculty of law at CUEA the best in the country.”
Dean Faculty of Law CUEA
Also speaking at the function, the Dean of the Faculty of Law of CUEA, Dr. Maurice Ajwang Owour, said “the faculty of Law must distinguish itself among other faculties and we are determined to be not among the best but the best faculty of Law in the republic of Kenya.”
He noted that the faculty of Law intends to distinguish itself not only in the area of Regional Integration but also in research such that the faculty becomes a center of research where both lecturers and students will benefit. “We are already in conversations with the Kenya School of Law to assist us launch short causes. And these short causes will be beneficial not only to the faculty of law but also to members of other faculties,” he said adding that there has been plans to have post graduate programs at the faculty but this was not possible without the license. He said that the faculty has shared the proposal with the university on some timeline hopes to launch its LLM Programs by October next year.
The journey to accreditation started in 2007-2008; therefore the granting of the license has been a culmination of a long journey. Among the conditions laid by the Council for Legal Education for the faculty to be accredited included the review of the curriculum, improvement of facilities acquiring more reading material as well as increasing the lecturer staff ratio.
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