Our school is currently having preliminary competitions ahead of our inter-house sports, which is billed for next month. Last Friday, my House had a football match (semi finals). Ahead of the match, we were having a last minute training in one corner of the school.
The referee finally blew the whistle to call the players to the field, but my team captain (the school’s games prefect) was nowhere to be found. I was desperately furious. We all started shouting his name. Suddenly, we saw him by the school fence struggling to get himself away from three boys who were apparently from the outside. One of the boys even had a stone in his hand and was threatening to hit the student with it.
Immediately, I rushed to the scene, but I noticed that some of the students who were running with me had already carried stones and sticks. It immediately dawned on me that a possible full-scale riot was in the waiting. I had to stop for few seconds and ordered the students to drop the stuff they were carrying. They did and we walked orderly to the scene.
When I got there, I asked one of the boys who was obviously the one that led the assault, what the problem was. According to him, his younger brother brought his MP3 player to school and the senior student seized it, so he wanted him (the senior student) to return the MP3 player. As angry as I was, I could not avoid laughing at such ignorance. First of all, an MP3 player is not a learning material so the said boy had no reason to bring the device to school. Secondly, how on earth did they think that they can come into a school with a population of over 2,000 students, beat up the Games Prefect, and walk away?
Anyways, the senior student insisted that he did not seize any MP3 player from any student. While the argument was going on, the said junior student was brought to me, and when I asked him if the senior student seized the MP3 player from him, he started stammering. It was then that another junior student said that the MP3 player was not seized but got missing in the class. So, the junior student actually misplaced the device but lied to his elder brother obviously to save himself.
Moral of the story is, NOT EVERY STUDENTS’ RIOT IS AN ACT OF CULTISM. The society must understand that students are humans, too, and it must tread cautiously. In the first place, the fact that we are even talking about cultism in our secondary schools is an indictment on the society. Correct me if I’m wrong, cults are not invented in secondary schools. These children only succumb to the pressure from a dysfunctional society.
A dysfunctional society is made up of parents who are harboring their overgrown wayward babies; spouses who are professing love to their partners whom they know are cultists; politics that has held the ladder for people with questionable characters to climb to the top; security officers who look the other way when their associates and ‘VIPs’ are involved in vices, etc. A dysfunctional society has no moral justification to vilify these children after exerting bad influences on them.
By Edidiong Udobia
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