25th May 2021 Things donât look pretty for engineering students at the Gaborone University College of Law (abbreviated as âGUCâ) who are being cold-shouldered by the Engineers Registration Board (ERB). While the Botswana Qualifications Authority (BQA) has accredited the programme, the ERB has declined to register GUC-graduated engineers because the programme doesnât meet its necessarily stringent standards. The students are understandably panicked but nothing suggests that ERB will relax its standards in order to accommodate GUC graduates. It is yet unclear how this particular case will end but the university has been down this road before. Once before, BQA has approved an LLB programme that GUC planned to offer in the not-too-distant future. The problem though was that the programme was not on a list of universities that are recognised by the Legal Practitioners Act. In terms of Section 4 of the Act, Botswana citizens shall be qualified to practise as legal practitioners if they hold an LLB from the universities of Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland, the former University of Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland, universities in Britain, Northern Ireland, South Africa, Australia as well as the American University in Washington D.C., Syracuse University in New York, the University of Zambia and the University of Ghana. In essence, BQA had approved a programme offered by an institution which had no statutory recognition.