I regret to inform everyone that has been looking forward to my posts about the GHABSA congress, including myself, that the congress has been canceled. This is not the post you were expecting to see today, I know. It wasn’t what I was expecting to be writing about either. The congress as I told you guys, was scheduled to start tomorrow and everything being equal, I should've been sipping on some drink and staring at mountains and beautiful green forests out of the windows of a bus right now if the unexpected didn't happen. But we got surprised, and not in a good way. Maybe the fact that the congress date got changed multiple times was the biggest sign something like this was going to happen. It was initially planned to happen on the same date, the 16th of last month July, but got postponed to this month.
The fliers are all the property of GHABSA
All of these fliers, useless in the end. sigh. This is the first time something like this has happened. From what I was told, the congress was cancelled because a number of the participating universities including University of Ghana (UG), University of Health and Allied Sciences(UHAS), and University of Cape Coast(UCC) have withdrawn their participation.
I didn’t get why they took this action, but my guess is that it was due to a lack of numbers or participation by the respective students of the university campuses. On my own University campus, CK Tedam University of Technology and Applied Sciences(CKT-UTAS), the number of students participating in the congress were just 7. 7 students out of a total of hundreds of students in the Biochemistry department, of course we should’ve been expecting this.
I also received information the disappointing numbers were not just from our campus, but was same for other campuses as well. A national congress can not be held with only 7 students or so from each University campus. There were games and events planned that will not be feasible with these small numbers. We had football and an inter school quiz for example and these all required at least 11 students from each campus.
In my opinion the reason for the low attendance was mainly due to the high cost of the congress. I don’t know about the other schools , but for my school, each student that would go for the congress was required to pay 400GHC($44 according to coinmarketcap conversions). The system in Ghana right now is very hard for students to have this kind of money lying around to spend on “luxuries”. For me, I believe the congress was worth it though. Or should I say would’ve been.
You know, at first when I heard it was cancelled, I didn’t want to believe it. Because just earlier yesterday around 3pm we (students going for the congress) held a meeting to discuss our departure and things relating to the activities of the congress we’ll be going for tomorrow(that is actually today now since I’m speaking from yesterday). There was no mention of any school withdrawing from the congress so it seemed like all was going well on the surface. Atisheila all is not going well. (“Atisheila” is Dagbani for “not knowing”).
And the funniest part, I wasn’t even told the congress had been called off, I texted the GHABSA president of my school to inquire before he dropped the bombshell on me. I just said “okay” in the text, but my mind said “FUCK!”. I made a lot of plans in advance for this and everything just got swept away and even worse, on the eve of our departure. 4 congresses has happened since I came to University(I’ve been in Uni for 4 years now) and I’ve never attended any. For most of them, I just didn’t feel like it. Except this last one obviously, and this had to happen when I was finally interested? FUCK!
image from tenor
I had already texted some of my friends in the host school informing them I'll be on their campus today. Most of them already had made plans to meet with me multiple times during their holidays but I had to cancel them because my school wasn't on holidays and I was in school then. I promised them I'd make it up to them when I see them in this congress. Turns out, GHABSA made me into a lie now. I also have mentioned the congress multiple times in my previous posts and informed people to anticipate stories about it. Sorry, everyone.
image from tenor
Out I go now to lectures. Something I wasn’t planning on doing today. Sigh.😤
Ps: I wrote this last night but didn’t want to post it cos I had made 2 posts already and didn’t want to burden my readers