The principal of the Federal Government College in Ijaniki, Lagos State; Mrs. Tofunmi Akamo, said that the school has picked up and suspended the six kids from the hotel and that the incident had only happened once.
She refuted claims that she covered up certain students who were seen skipping class to stay with female classmates at a hotel for sex encounters.
Speaking to Punch, the principal claims that during an urgent roll call at the hostel, school management became aware of the pupils’ disappearance.
“I was called by the school that they did a roll call on Sunday and some students were discovered not to be in the hostel.
“So, that Monday morning, they called their parents to confirm if they were at home and the parents said they were not at home. The parents came to the school; we were all searching and investigating what could have happened.
“One of the parents of those girls told us that the girls went to the hotel, jumping the fence on Sunday. We went to the hotel to evacuate them. They were five that were evacuated; two boys and three girls.
“When they came to the school, we asked them to write reports; it was through the report that we even discovered that there was another girl who left on Monday to come back to school, while others remained in the hotel.
“We made them write their reports and they faced a disciplinary committee, which gave a verdict on what to be done to them according to the guidelines given to us from the ministry.
“The children are currently on indefinite suspension; that is the guideline recommended for them. We normally involve their parents and hand such letters and their children to them. The girls and the boys are no longer in the dormitories. That is the only incident that happened and it happened two or three weeks before we vacated this last term.”
Akamo added that claims of the students being drug abusers are unfounded. According to her “Late last session when they were writing an external examination, we discovered that some boys were not in the hostel during roll check and we learned that they normally went to a nightclub around our school.
“My chief security officer went there around 9 pm and at that time they had not arrived at the club. So, the owner of the club collected the number of my CSO so that he would inform him.
“By 11 pm, they called my CSO and by 1 am we brought about 10 of them back to school. One of them was my assistant head boy and immediately, we had an assembly; I brought all of them out and de-badged the prefects among them.
“I also asked them to leave the dormitories; but they could be coming to sit their external examinations, which they were writing at that time. I told them they could no longer stay in the hostel.
“There is no history of anybody getting pregnant as a student. We knew one of the girls had one million naira in her account. I am sure this child has been showing all of these things at home. It cannot be that it was inside the school that she learned how to go and make money from sex.
“The only time we had an issue of a pregnancy in the school was a blind girl. The lady got pregnant during COVID-19 at a place she used to go to play with people. After we did a test and we discovered she was pregnant, we invited the father and she left the school. I told her that she could not stay in the school because we are training young girls and not mothers-to-be.
“The claim by the PTA chairman that one of the students impregnated another student is not true. There is nothing like that; I am not aware and if that happens I will know.”
“Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”