By Isaac Olusesi
THE recent dismissal of the morally sick Ile-Ife High School students from public schools of the State of Osun, Nigeria is purgative. But the punishment is not anything far reaching. The students, oriented to some unambiguous enemy public symbols, descended on Osun Radio, an action that ironically violated the public sense of security and also paradoxically gave the Ife mutineers publicity of hate and condemnation from across the global village. Not publicity that could induce the Osun government towards their cause.
The conduct of the students at the state radio house ranged from shouting obscenities to assault, and vandalism that created an overwhelming fear. It was also sabotage, to slow or halt the Rauf Aregbesola governance and administration of Osun, like an insurgent scene from the French railway riot of 1910 when workers destroyed sabots, the wooden shoes, that held the rail in place.
The orgy of violence infiltrated the surroundings of the radio house and some sections of metropolitan Ile-Ife. But the attitude of the people in the vicinity of the brutish attack on the radio house was not that of indignation and hostility to the Ife mob, the common enemies of the state. The people did not act in any heroic manner. They only released accumulated tension by motions, dancing, singing, and other symbolic gestures of mere emotions.
The Ife people in the communities surrounding the radio house were only in collective frenzy. Their goal was collaborative and obsessive. The people were merely expressive crowds that also failed to identify the apparent danger towards which to act. They brooked delay and dissent, perhaps from fear as collective behaviour at the news of the invasion of the Osun Radio. The criminal attack made the individuals exhibit intense panic. But that could not have been the only conceivable course of action. The Principals of the rebellious Ife schools ought to come under closer scrutiny. The conduct of the students at the radio house promptly reflected the manifests of the schools under the nose of the principals. Meaning that, the principals had unsuspectingly lost touch with value clarification, moral development, value analysis, and value inculcation in the students a long time ago, such that the attack on the state radio is just the effect of the endorsement of value deficiency somehow by the principals who ought to always help their students learn to become responsible citizens.
The hostile students from Ife schools lacked the ability to input moral questions into their mob conduct in progress, and their principals deliberately ignored the aura of their students’ treasonable attack that must have enveloped their schools, in its embryo. Neither did the principals deploy the tools of social investigation and techniques of logic into the matter for the riot.
The dismissal of the Ife villains from Osun schools by the state government is very much in order, but the dismissal should be one stanza of the penalty. The students had wanted to overrun the government by their stormy attack on the transmission room of Osun Radio to adulterate programmes on air.
The students, also as vandals ought to be sanctioned further. The conduct of the students is more of a deliberately calculated crime that should be more punished by the state statutes that affix penalties and mode of treatment applicable to the crime to make the student-criminals give retribution for harm done and expiate their moral guilt. Even the civil disobedience groups considered as most privileged protesters willingly accept punishment for violating public order.
The students could not be excused on accounts of ignorance of the facts of their conduct. One, their teen ages could not be asserted in defence of the criminal charges in such a matter. Two, the conduct of the students at the radio house is actus rea, a voluntary omission, accompanied by mense rea, a guilty state of mind as their conduct is reckless. Three, the students could not be said to be fatigued, symptomatic of irritability and inhibition to rationalize.
Four, the students were not drunk when the offence was committed as that could even aggravate their culpability, and they did not display any discernible mental disorder as to deprive them of substantial capacity to appreciate the criminality of their conduct. Five, the conduct is obviously dangerous and immoral, a menace requiring police apprehension and prosecution of the lawless students, at least to put them away from the society for a period of time so that they can no longer attack public property. Incarcerating them for, say three (3) months at the least will deprive them of their freedom as a way of making them pay a debt to the society they had tortured by their conduct at the radio house.
Six, the incapacitation and retribution will deter them from future crime. And the society and public property will be protected from dangerous elements.And seven, the correctional centres that hold offenders under the age of 18 will keep the Ife High School students from further contact with bad influence and will offer them counselling , behavior re-training, skills in art works, and recreation activities to boost their health.
Criminal damage to public and private property is punishable by fines or imprisonment. Describing the attack by the rascally Ife students on the radio house as a war by proxy would not be an over-statement. The aggressive students, as mercenaries, carried out the invasion of such gravity in the inviolable premises of the Osun Radio, a neutral territory, out of bounds to the belligerents and they were substantially motivated and paid, or so it seemed.
. Olusesi is Assistant Director, Directorate of Publicity, Research & Strategy, (APC), State of Osun.