Justice for Queen’s College girls

In a week that saw 113 women out of 161 who graduated with first class honours at the Law School, we must pause and weep for Praise Sodipo and two other girls of Queen’s College, Lagos who died 17 moths ago due to negligence of the school authorities.

But we must not only weep, we must demand for justice for the trio. This is a country that consumes her young, but we cannot afford to make the girls’ deaths a mere footnote in the awful din of who-becomes-what in the 2019 general elections. This column had warned in a piece on April 12, 2017, that Praise Sodipo must not die in vain, sadly the warning fell on deaf ears. In a moment of fine journalism, this newspaper nearly three weeks ago reminded us that lives are cheap and count almost for nothing in this part of the world. The story, https://www.thecable.ng/17-months-after-no-justice-for-queens-college-girls-who-died-with-their-dreams must leave every right thinking person depress and sad at what we have turned to when teenagers placed under the watch of school administrators could lose their lives without anybody being punished for such negligence.

I’ve always believed that the least regulated tier of schools in Nigeria is our secondary schools where many are seeking qualitative education for their children with pocket-friendly costs. But with an ever-increasing population of students than what the public schools can cater for, many proprietors and administrators of these schools perpetrate acts of criminality without anybody calling them to order. And since it is a mass market, anything goes. It is also shocking that Nigerians do not seem to be perturbed about the needless loss of lives going by the number of people I counted that had shared the October 5 piece which is a follow up on what happened nearly two years ago. When one look at the foot dragging which is emblematic of the Buhari presidency, one might not be too shocked that the minister of education has not done anything on the sad incident. No public enquiry not to talk of the results of such enquiry attracting a white paper and consequently their can be no prosecution in a case that has all attributes of criminal negligence.

The old students of Queen’s College too huffed and puffed but nothing came out of their determination then to get justice for Sodipo and the two other girls. The Parents Teachers Association appeared to be too much in a hurry to bury the case, as the school’s reputation seems more important than students’ lives. Of course until I read this newspaper’s update, I could not even imagine that we still have an education minister who apparently leads with the mantra, see no evil and hear no evil. Who knows what lives Sodipo and the other two girls could have had as citizens of this country if their lives were not terminated abruptly, sadly still Sodipo was an orphan under the care of her uncle who was forced to bury her at her teenage years.

Our society too does not seemed outraged or bothered about acts like this, otherwise we should be out there chanting “Justice for Queen’s College Girls” rather than concentrating our energy on party politics only. Such was the largely lethargic way we received the news of the Islamic State West Africa, a faction of Boko Haram; execution of Hauwa Leman, a Red Cross worker and 24-year old mother studying health education at the University of Maiduguri. Till date, Leah Sharibu is still in captivity since she was captured on February 19. One of the girls taken from Dapchi, her only sin is that she refused to renounce her faith while others who are not Christians were released. Everywhere one turns to, our children and young adults are fast becoming endangered species with little or nothing done to protect them. We can gauge correctly how a society is in the way it treats the weak, oppressed and minors. Our scorecard is bad on this, truth be told.

A fitting memorial to the Queen’s College girls’ memory will be to bring to justice all found to be culpable in their deaths. It will also be justice for their parents and guardians and warning to those charged with the upkeep of our children as school administrators.

University of Ibadan Zoology Department at 70

It was with nostalgia I returned to my old department on Wednesday, October 17, as part of activities marking the department’s 70^th anniversary. It was also the first time I went back officially 24 years after graduation even though I’ve always visited the university on other assignments. Like other institutions, my old department is not immune to the vicissitudes of higher education in Nigeria; a major one clearly remains low funding.

But kudos to the folks holding the fort there, they’re making the best of the little they have. Under the leadership of Kunle Bakare, a professor of genetics and current head of department, the department is still striving to produce men and women in learning and good character. Fittingly, I was further asked to speak on “Zoology outside the University” since I had left the field with my foray into journalism. I will always be grateful for the total education my generation received from the department, which enabled us, and still does, to diversify into fields like journalism, advertising, accounting and information technology. Hopefully, it will not take another 24 years before I return. Congratulations to the wonderful staff and students of the department.