Or should I say there was? Certainly, I wouldn’t want to be at campus today. And it has nothing to do with the crumpled lecture rooms, decaying libraries, and weevil-infested “murram.” These are certainly matters of concern, but then, they are beyond the students’ power to change?

What I find most unacceptable is the dramatic fall in standards – and we are not talking academic standards here (those have dropped too). Someone explain this to me: how does a campuser buy a cob of maize and proceed to “de-cob” it in broad daylight?

This is precisely what I saw students do the other day. Boys and girls, shamelessly buying Shs 100 boiled maize cobs and proceeding to munch at them. And we haven’t even mentioned the dingy “restaurants” in areas like Katanga where they huddle – boys and girls together - to eat “lunch” of Shs 100 and other funny things like “rolex.”

What beats me is that overall, campus students these days have more money than we used to. There are certainly more cars, designer clothes and colour TVs than there used to be in our time. It seems, however, that all that glitters is not gold. Either all these trappings of “wealth” are nothing but showbiz, or campusers have lost the sense of style and sophistication befitting of university students.

Picture this: your girlfriend visits you in your (now overcrowded) room in Nkrumah and you go “Sweetie, care for a cup of coffee and a cob of boiled maize?” Just how romantic is that?

In our day, we did not offer our squeezes maize, samosa or chapati. No way. We unleashed bread, butter and jam on them – at the very worst. Otherwise, it was a case of hot chocolate and butter cookies, or a bottle of red wine. Of course, these did not constitute our daily diet. We only kept them on the shelves strictly for the purpose of impressing the chics. And we did eat maize too. But never in the presence of the chics.

Now, that was style. We took these issues of class so seriously that a story is told of a Lumumbist who had a heart attack after his girlfriend caught him eating kabalagala (pancake baked from cassava flour and ripe bananas).

It all started when the girlfriend made an unexpected entrance into the guy’s room. The guy, who was enjoying the kabalagala with his evening tea, threw the inauspicious snack under the bed. Being round and crisp, the kabalagala rolled right back into view from under the bed.

The embarrassment left our Lumumbist friend in a fatal state of cardiac arrest. May his soul rest in peace.

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