As I lie on my sick bed, I want to offer this tribute for a woman I regard as my career mother.
I first started hearing the name Bernadette Cole when I started media practice as student of Fourah Bay College in 1991 and serving as War Correspondence for the Weekend Spark Newspaper for the Eastern and Southern Provinces of Sierra Leone.
I had to have face to face in depth interaction with this wonderful woman when I was appointed Commissioner of the Independent Media Commission (IMC) in 2008 at the same time, she was also appointed Chairperson of the same Commission.
At the IMC, Mrs Cole used her administrative and professional acumen to raise the near-to-defunct IMC to an enviable stature amongst good governance institutions in this country.
Under her leadership as Chair of the IMC, we transformed that Commission into an effective and professional media regulatory institution and gave it a facelift.
Under her dynamic leadership, we established a well-resourced functional Monitoring Unit of the Commission with Media Monitors all around the country and also strengthened the Resource Center with research materials for use by journalists and the public.
With Mrs Cole, the IMC constituted an effective Complaints Committee to conduct hearings of complaints brought by the public against media institutions and other Committees of the Commission to aid the effective operations of the Commission.
To transform the SLBS into the SLBC, it was Mrs Cole who led a four-man delegation including me, to Accra-Ghana to look at the makeup of the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation (GBC) from which we came with a template used to model the establishment of the now SLBC, the public broadcaster which is what this nation is enjoying today.
If I am a renowned Lecturer today at FBC, it is because there was a Mrs. Bernadet Cole who doubled then as Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Chairperson of IMC who encouraged me to apply to lecture at FBC.
She reposed so much confidence in me during my three years service under her leadership as Chair of the IMC that my colleague Commissioners used to refer to me as the first Boy Son of her, because wherever she was invited and could not go, I almost always represented her.
Aunty Bannie, as I informally used to call her, was very warm, kind-hearted, effective, dutiful, thorough, sincere, faithful, hardworking, honest and systematic. She was my mentor and a great woman indeed. Bye and Bye Mammy Cole, may God grant you eternal life.
My condolences to the Luke and Cole families.
By Augustine A..Garmoh – Lecturer, FBC
