Destructive students’ riots
The spate of destructive riots by students in some schools in the Northern Region leaves much to be desired, especially looking at the average age of the students. It is too early in their lives to think and act with a destructive mentality.
Advertisement
As Dr King succinctly puts it, destruction is never the solution to a pursuit of progress and improvement in our conditions of life.
Students cannot take the law into their hands no matter how bad they feel about the failures of their school authorities.
That is why parents have the obligation to educate their children to not take part in dastardly acts as part of protests against issues they consider to be detrimental to their hospitable stay as boarding students in senior high schools.
In some situations, a few misguided students infest their colleagues to misconduct, not necessarily because the school authorities are autocratic, but because they do not want to submit to discipline, an ingredient necessary for their future as productive and independent adults.
When their proclivity for waywardness is checked and contained, they nurse evil thoughts and sometimes they benefit from mob action to win the support of otherwise docile students who, though convinced that there is no merit in the act, are nevertheless eager to join their deviant colleagues in causing mayhem.
The other side is that most often thorough investigations are not carried out such that the concomitant is that every student is accused and made to share in the cost of the destruction. In that case being passive no longer pays.
That within a few weeks students of the Salaga T.I. Ahmadiyya Senior High School , Karaga Senior High School and Nalerigu Senior High School, all in the Northern Region, have been involved in violent riots, and in particular that some fatalities were recorded in the attempts to contain the situation by the police, must give cause for alarm.
Apart from the fact that the region does have diffused presence of senior high schools, the level of education does not measure up to other parts of the country, except for a few facilities that can compare nationwide.
Many of the workers who serve in these schools have sacrificed to be there and so need to be commended for offering their services.
That is why it becomes intolerable for the students to do what they have done. Facilities are not at comparative levels and the little which is available is destroyed.
To stem the dysfunctional trend, the Ghana Education Service must liaise with district assemblies and the corresponding district security committees through the regional security committee and the National Security Council for the necessary action(s) and to nip fresh development in the bud.
We must understand the immediate and remote causes of such riots.
However, whatever the reasons, it can never be accepted that students would have to resort to destruction as a means of seeking redress for their grievances.
There are some school authorities who are cheats and do not serve the needs of the students.
Yet there are others who are held to ransom for lack of policy congruence. Whereas the Ghana Education Service publicly decries the levying of students beyond approved levels, often public funding does not measure up to the cost of properly maintaining and feeding the students.
The issue of arrears in the release of government scholarships for senior high school students in the three northern regions, particularly feeding grants, is always a duel between school authorities and the Ghana Education Service/ Ministry of Education.
Annually, schools in those parts of the country are forced to close down early and reopen late because we as a people (through the government) are unable to provide the funds in good time to meet their demands. When that happens, school authorities bear the brunt of creditors and suppliers.
We need to conduct thorough investigations into the recent riots to establish whether the students had any justification to have embarked on any protest and whether remedial actions were undertaken to stem the tide.
Critical assessment of the riots is necessary to expose the culprits such that innocent students are not wrongfully tagged as being of riotous behaviour or pay for conduct they did not support.
Students must be told in no uncertain terms that no matter their concerns, they cannot resort to destruction of public or private property in seeking redress. Parents have obligations here.