Dowen College death: How well do we know our children?

“Every child that went to boarding school has at least one traumatic story to tell”. That was from my son. He chatted with me on the Dowen College incident. The boy shocked me. Before Friday, December 3, 2021, if anyone had asked me how close I was to my 19-year old little boy, I would have answered: “sufficiently”. I would have gone ahead to add that I was, his best confidant, a gist mate and the one he relies on, exclusively, for guidance. But I would have been wrong. The boy shocked me by what he revealed to me that fateful Friday. He had sent me a WhatsApp message about last Tuesday’s incident at Dowen College, Lekki, Lagos, where a 12-year old Sylvester Oromoni was allegedly bullied to death. My son had asked if I had heard anything about the school and I answered in the affirmative. Then I asked why he asked about the school and he answered by referring to the little Oromoni’s case. I assured him that the Lagos State Government had taken the first step of shutting the school down for proper investigation. Then he dropped the introductory lines.

“Including you”? I probed further when he told me that he dared and hated boarding school. He answered by saying, “Yes. First of all, my ears”. He was in a Catholic Church-run boarding school. In his SS2 year, we noticed that he had problems with his ears. The mother and I asked him what happened, and he told us that he was slapped by a teacher. The following day, we took him to the teaching hospital in town, where an ENT doctor told us that he had his eardrum torn! Alarmed, we started asking several questions and to cut the long story short, my boy has been a regular guest at the hospital’s ENT ward ever since. I wrote a letter to the school authorities and I merely got a terse apology.

Not done, he mentioned his third term in SS1, when he was afraid to go back to school because one of the seniors “almost killed me because of yeye anger issues and senior perfect post”. I told him that he never mentioned to us that incident and he responded by referring to the day he cried at the motor park while going back to school. I recalled that incident. But I only thought he was crying that day because he had spent sufficient time with his elder brother, who just graduated from university and so was nostalgic. What did the senior do to him? “He beat me with big wood and hangers”. Why did he not mention it to me? “Bullying was normal in Lumen and they won’t expel him because he was one of the brightest students and among the senior prefects”,  was his response. Because he had the pre-knowledge that the school authorities would not expel “one of the brightest students”, my boy decided to bear his burden of constant bullying till he became a senior student himself. Only God knows what he must have endured. Probably, but for God’s grace, he too could have been another Oromoni!

The issue of bullying among school children is as old as education itself. The act does not wear any religious colour. I sent my boy to a Catholic secondary school because of the level of discipline in the Catholic primary school he attended. While on holidays, we took time to listen to all his school gists. We laughed at many of the stories. I cautioned him on some and advised him on many others and why he should have handled them differently. I was away in Lagos for most of his secondary school days, but never missed out on his holiday stories. I attended a couple of his “open days” while his mother never missed any PTA meeting or any “open day” that I could not attend. I thought he had no secrets; that he had told us all the happenings around him while in school. How wrong I was. He was bullied, terrified and warned not to mention it and he never did. Yet, he is my “gist mate”.

The departed Sylvester Oromoni could have been a victim of a long period of bullying that he dared not tell his parents until that fatal incident. The poor little boy might have withheld the information from his parents not because they were not close to him, but because the fear of his oppressors was the beginning of wisdom. What about the boarding house masters, the baby sitters for the children? Why did Sylvester not report his oppressors to them? Could it be that he too, like my boy, had come to realise that “bullying was normal in Dowen” and  that the school authorities would not expel his oppressors because they were “one of the brightest students and among the senior prefects”?  Going by the magnitude of the Oromoni’s case, I would like to believe that this was not the first of its kind in that highbrow school. Taking into cognizance the spirited denial by the school authorities that the late Sylvester was injured while playing football, even when it had not seen the medical report, it is crystal clear that the school authorities must have explained off previous cases of bullying the same way such that the students have lost confidence in the ability of the school to protect them.

What should a normal school, run by human beings do in a circumstance like this? The late student mentioned some names. Why was it too difficult for the school management to invite the parents of the accused and security agents and hand over the named students to the police for thorough investigation? Why the rush to explain off the injury as the one sustained while playing football. Again, if other people’s children are under your care and you know well that some 10-year and 12-year-olds would be playing “dangerous football”, why did you not appoint adults to supervise them? If Sylvester had indeed sustained such a fatal injury while playing football, with an adult supervising them, would help not have come the way of the “injured” almost immediately? How else do we define negligence?

Besides the school management, what has happened to the morals of the parents of the four children allegedly named by the late Sylvester? How on earth will a child be named in a murder case and days after, the parents of such an accused child will feel comfortable keeping mute? Have morals, values and the sanctity of human life become so base  in this nation that we are not a bit better than the four-legged beings again? I had expected that the parents of the children mentioned in the case would have driven their children to the nearest police post, get lawyers for them to hold watching briefs, and call for thorough investigation. That to me is how to instill discipline in a child. Shielding the accused children from the public scrutiny of their culpability or otherwise in the death of Sylvester is postponing the evil day. If indeed those children were involved and their parents danced round the issue, a day of reckoning beckons. And I assure those  parents that the calamity would be like a heavy rainfall.

My mind tells me that Sylvester is not going to be the last victim of bullying in our schools. The Nigerian nation lost it the very moment it allowed public schools to collapse beyond redemption and threw parents and their children at the mercy of shylock private school owners, who are more interested in how much money they can make than how much morals they can inculcate in the children under their watch. How our society expects teachers who are paid next to nothing to pay due attention to the children under their care beats one’s imagination. How the Nigerian society expects children sired by parents who are enmeshed in occultism, thieving politicians and irresponsible partners in homes, where men are mere semen donors than “fathers” to behave responsibly, is another puzzle.

Every tree sheds its leaves by its stump. Irresponsibility begets irresponsibility. Until we all wake up and smell the coffee by instilling in our children and wards alike, the right morals and social values, incidents like the Dowen College bullying will become commonplace. Until we go back to that old society, where the entire clan claims fatherhood of a child and disciplines him or her as such, we will have many cases like the Sylvester’s to handle. As long as we hold on to the “civilised” term of “my child”, rather than the old term of “our child”, we will continue to have monsters in all our boarding schools. Could our elders have been wrong when they propounded the philosophy of “four eyes sire a child, two hundred eyes nurture him to maturity”? That philosophy built our society of old and we were happy for it.  If you are in doubt about the rot in the family system of today, visit some homes. Bullies are destiny killers. May God protect our children from murderous bullies.

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