A Junior Secondary School (JSS) 2 student, has stabbed a school prefect in Senior Secondary School (SSS) 3, in one of the public schools in Calabar, Cross Rivers State.
The school prefect, Joseph Umoren was reportedly stabbed with a knife by the junior student (name withheld) after Umoren asked the junior to correct his stockings as he was wearing a wrong stockings.
The junior was said to have gathered his gang against the senior where he eventually stabbed him in the neck.
Speaking to journalists on Tuesday, July 20, during a visit to professor Boniface Odey, Chairman, National Parent Teacher Association of Nigeria (NAPTAN), Cross River State chapter, the Senior Adviser to Governor Ben Ayade on Education, Mr Castro Ezama, lamented on the skyrocketed cases of cultism in secondary and primary schools in the state.
Ezama, revealed that the injured student, who was rushed to the University of Calabar Teaching Hospital(UCTH), nearly lost his life if not for the prompt intervention of teachers, security agencies and health officials.
“There’s a high level of moral decadence amongst our school children. In the course of interacting with them I realized that some of them at home drink alcohol, they are served alcoholic beverages. And of course, we know that giving alcoholic beverages to children that are younger than age 18 is not acceptable. There are advertorials everywhere. Of course, we know the far-reaching health implication.
“Secret cults have penetrated our secondary schools and even some of our primary schools. Just recently in one of our secondary schools, a prefect of a school was stabbed because he asked the junior student to take off his wrong stockings. He got his boys around and they stabbed him on his jugular. It took the intervention of the school management, my office, security agencies and the health officials of UCTH to put that boy to live, and we thank God that the boy is alive,”
“I think that if we go about bringing parents on board where we have resource persons, government officials get to talk to our parents on the need for them to be more vigilant at home in taking care of their wards and children – it will go a long way to eradicating the antisocial activities we now find” Ezama said.
In his own part, professor Odey said;
“We parents have problem on how to handle our children at home because if we have done properly well, these problems we have in schools will not come up. We are promising you we will sit up as parents to make sure the vices we are having in our schools today are no more in no too distant future from now”.
