THE article, “No cheers for the graduates,” which appeared in the October 1-7 issue of the Lesotho Times referred to National University of Lesotho (NUL) law graduates as a “bunch of half-baked or dunderhead lawyers.”
Your sister paper, the Sunday Express also made similar comments in the article titled, ‘Not so bright lawyers unleashed.”
This makes me wonder if failing to win an academic award automatically renders one a dunderhead.
Is the writer aware that in the faculty of social sciences there were at least five students who graduated with first classes but only two received awards?
Should we label the other three dunderheads?
What of the 39 law graduates who received degrees with 2.2 pass?
Yes, they are not Einsteins but neither are they dunderheads.
In my opinion to call the law graduates dunderheads is really resorting to language typical to the language used by South Africa’s Julius Malema.
The writer went further and referred to a “system that can’t produce more than one brilliant student.”
If the writer had asked the Law Faculty he would have found out that the award conferred in the faculty related to a course offered in the first two years of the five-year LLB programme.
A good journalist would have come up with these facts rather than make unfounded assumptions about the best student in that programme.
I had assumed that journalists from the Lesotho Times were smarter than those at their main rivals across town until I read the article.
If you were smarter you would have written about the worst faux pas which occurred on graduation day when a member of the council decided to usurp the Chancellor’s powers by declaring the 34th Convocation open instead of requesting the Chancellor to do so.
But nowhere was this reported in your newspaper and its sister publication.
What on earth were you and your colleagues listening to on that day?
Or did you spend graduation eve at Kay Cees with these students?
I rest my case.
Teboho Nzheku
NUL, Roma
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