The cult killings at Ambrose Alli varsity

FIVE  persons, including graduating students and ex-students of Ambrose Alli University, Ekpoma, Edo State, were reportedly murdered in cold blood in a bar near a private hostel in the university town last week. The youths were said to be having a graduation party when a fracas that culminated in the shooting and killing of the victims broke out. One of the parties to the misunderstanding had reportedly escaped from the scene of the mayhem with a bruised ego only to allegedly return with fully armed friends to execute the dastardly act. The Edo State police command has declared that the killings were cult-related but the university authorities claimed they had nothing to do with cultism. The university’s position is understandable because it does not want to be associated with cultism but the police are best suited to determine the nature of a crime as well as the motive based on their investigation.

Notwithstanding the character of the crime and the motivation for it, the butchery was horrendous and highly reprehensible. It is unfortunate that Ambrose Alli University has yet to shed the toga of cultism and violence for which some of its students were notorious in times past. Many had thought that after the elaborate confessions and public renunciations of cultism in many tertiary institutions some years ago, the institutions were enjoying permanent respite from the dastardly activities of the misguided youths who engaged in cultism. But it would appear that cultism is returning to the tertiary institutions with full force. This is very unsettling because it is a sad reminder of the heyday of cultism when the campuses of tertiary institutions in the country were arguably the most dangerous and unsafe places to study, work or live.

Even those who laid claim to patriotic zeal and some other noble intentions in introducing  a confraternity into the country’s first university, the University of Ibadan, in the early 1950s can hardly believe the kind of monster that it has become and the violence unleashed on the society. Today, diverse cult groups, strangely populated by artisans and school dropouts, are ubiquitous in the streets of cities and towns in the country, regularly visiting deadly violence on one another and members of the public in their unending supremacy battles. That is the level of social disorientation and criminality that cultism has engendered in the country.

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Painfully, the dreams of five young graduates were cut short brutally just like that at a party. It is rather difficult to fathom why this type of barbaric behaviour is found among youths in a supposedly enlightened and civilised environment. Why would educated people commit such atrocities? This dangerous propensity clearly calls to question the kind of orientation some students have as well as the quality of moral instructions they receive.  The seeming resurgence of cultism in the country’s tertiary institutions has to be checked and very swiftly too. The polity is already beset with myriads of economic and social maladies and adding the evils of cultism on campuses to them may drive it to a breaking point.

The Ambrose Alli University authorities should stop living in denial. They should develop a fool-proof system using the instrumentality of the Post-Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (post-UTME) screening exercise to determine and sieve out candidates that show evidence of proclivity for violence and/or have the faintest attributes of  cultists. This objective should ordinarily form part of the essence of the post-UTME screening exercise; it should not only be an avenue for making money for tertiary institutions under the guise of ascertaining the veracity of the academic standing of candidates aspiring to be students.

Sadly, the security agencies did nothing to pre-empt the unfortunate slaughtering. The notorious antecedents of some students of the university in relation to cultism and violence ought to have put any proactive security agencies on continuous alert. But apparently, there was intelligence failure among the security agencies, such that the planning and execution of the heinous crime escaped their radar. We urge the security agencies to brace up to the challenge of stamping out cultism and violence from Ambrose Alli University by making a recourse to the use of intelligence and deterrence. This onerous task should begin by ensuring that the perpetrators of the dastardly killings in Ekpoma are fished out and served their just deserts.