Those behind Queen’s College deaths must be prosecuted, says Saraki

Senate President Bukola Saraki wants those responsible for the deaths of three students of Queen’s College, Lagos, to be prosecuted.

The students died in February, following an outbreak of diarrhoea in the school. The federal government had  set up a team to investigate the incidents.

On Thursday, Chuks Okocha, Saraki’s special assistant on print media, quoted the senate president as saying that the red chamber will make efforts to ensure that such incident did not happen again.

Okocha said his principal has disclosed that the upper legislative chamber will conduct a thorough investigation into the circumstances surrounding the deaths.

“I will direct that when this matter comes to the floor as a motion. We will debate and make resolutions. Definitely, there must be an investigation,” Saraki was quoted to have said.

“In every civilised society, it is very shameful that young girls could lose their lives in this kind of situation. The best we can do is to make sure that this kind of incident never happens again.

“Management must explain how the situation got to this level and anybody who is found responsible, necessarily, they must be prosecuted.

“I think this would have been easily avoided and we can’t continue to live in a society like this, I want to assure you that we will look into this. The ministry of education, must tell us what they have been doing. We are sure that there has been release of funds, what have they done with it?”

Saraki also decried the dwindling fortunes of education in the country.

He called for an urgent roundtable discussion involving all stakeholders, the government and international development agencies to address the menace.

“We need to sit down and ask ourselves what we really need to do to fix education in this country. We cannot continue to watch things get this bad. Any laws we need to amend or any law we need to introduce, we need to address that,” he said.

“We have to do this and in the next couple of weeks, we have to sit down with chairmen of our relevant committees and see how we can find solutions with, experts, parents, MDAs and international organisations to sit down and resolve this issue.”