Maputo, 19 Nov (AIM) – Mozambican President Daniel Chapo on Wednesday challenged Maputo’s Eduardo Mondlane University (UEM), the oldest higher education institution in the country, “to meet the real needs of the country and of the world of work”.
Speaking at a graduation ceremony, Chapo warned that “the time when a university diploma automatically guaranteed a job has come to its end”.
Higher education, he said, should produce “creators of jobs” and not merely “candidates for employment”. This, he added, was one of the great strategic challenges for the future of the university and for the construction of the country’s economic independence.
Chapo noted that this was the first graduation ceremony since he became President. He promised that his term of office will be marked by a commitment “to establish the foundations for our economic independence, through the structural transformation of our economy”.
He evoked the historic legacy of the UEM, which he described as “an instrument of national emancipation, a factory of cadres, and a nursery of critical thought”.
It was in the UEM, he recalled, that “the first cadres were trained who built the Mozambican state”, and where much of the country’s modern national awareness was shaped.
He claimed that the UEM “is being reborn with new strength”. It was not just a teaching university but was becoming a research university “committed to science, innovation and social transformation”.
Chapo noted that, so far this year, 1,789 cadres have graduated from the UEM, 56 per cent of them women.
He told the new graduates “your diploma is not the end of a journey, but the start of a new responsibility”. Chapo urged the graduates “to serve Mozambique with competence, responsibility, honesty, integrity, ethics and patriotism”.
(AIM)
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