Terror on board school bus 26
Students travelling home on board School bus number 26 will never forget the harrowing experiences they were subjected to by a gang of wayward boys in school uniform. Reports have circulated for some time now about the conduct of certain school boys boarding Bus 26, including muggings and verbal abuse of other kids. The hoodlums who are from schools in the East of the city would skip the last lesson and make their way to the Clock Tower area in downtown to join the evening final bus trip headed for the Kissy, Wellington and Calaba Town route. They will then take out knives, razor blades, scissors and other sharp instruments and force mostly terrified girls to surrender their phones and money. These boys would then jump out of the window at the next stop. Such was the unruliness on that bus that many kids were scared of joining it and would rather wait for other means of travel.
Last Thursday evening chaos erupted in the bus again and as things escalated, the driver decided that enough was enough and drove down to the SLPMB Army Engineering depot which was the closest place he could reach in terms of security. One of the thugs jumped out of the window and was almost run down by a car, as he fled. Soldiers hearing the screams of the children quickly surrounded the bus and got the troublemakers out of the vehicle as they were being easily pointed out by the other shaken students. Police from Calaba Town Police station showed up afterwards and took them in for questioning.
The boys were said to come from the following schools: Ahmadiyya, King Fahad, Methodist Boys High and Municipal, and appeared to have formed a well-coordinated and sinister alliance, targeting timid boys and girls as the bus runs. We hate calling them school boys; they are thugs! That level of violence played out inside a school bus was unthinkable and we expect authorities in the schools those boys attend, to discipline them. In the 70s, 8os and early 90s expulsion of errant students was quite common. The last day of the annual education calendar would often mark the end of schooling for the student outlaws. This generation of children is being driven by so many distractions and it takes good parenting to get something meaningful from them. How many parents go to the school of their children to ask about their punctuality, academic progress and general behaviour? It behoves on every parent to play a dominant and effective role in shaping their kid into becoming a decent and productive person in society. But how many of us do?
The government provided those vehicles to ease the transportation challenges the students face, and not for them to become a theatre of mayhem aimed at innocent children attending school. Seeing the buses so full with students all over town, one could grasp their importance in the lives of these kids. And those miscreants were so daring to unleash terror on other kids. They ought to be disciplined now that the matter is in the hands of the police.
Curfew lifted but caution needed
The corona virus outbreak precipitated the introduction of a night curfew which caused great discomfort to many. Businesses especially those in the hospitality sector, took quite a hit, and those people coming from work late in the evening ended up stranded and in many cases walking to the nearest Police station to sit out the night, because commercial vehicles had mostly deserted the streets. People are happy at the lifting of the curfew though temporarily. NACOVERC which is the body charged with the responsibility of managing all matters pertaining to the pandemic has been cautious in lifting the night restriction; that is to run for a month and then be reviewed, taking all other factors into consideration. That sounds very reasonable indeed and it is up to us to as a people to adhere to all other protocols that would ward off the potential of a large scale outbreak. We must all continue to get the message across that Covid 19 is still with us and we must therefore continue to observe social distancing and other measures that mitigate infection. We have to be thankful as a nation for having escaped the scale of infection and horrendous death toll many other countries continue to face. But again we lost doctors, nurses and other health workers and some of our citizens, to the pandemic. We should never forget the sacrifices of those of our medical people who died, and the efforts of our present frontline workers including security people. So far, we must be thankful as a country, because of the low death rate, though the economic and social impacts remain quite immense. Livelihoods have indeed been lost and normal way of life altered, but we must soldier on. We believe Principal will be encouraged now to start the process of rolling out his administration’s flagship projects that were in the pipeline. Jobs will come and the economy oiled.We will with keen interest be keeping tabs on them.
No toilet for Marshall street Police Post
We are really shocked to discover that a whole post for such an important institution as the Police would have no toilet for officers and detainees. You may think this is a joke but it is real and it right here in the capital city. The Police Post on Marshall Street, close to Malta Street in the east of Freetown is located in a very tough neighbourhood and deals with some of the most difficult cases one could imagine. The very place called a Police post is an old 20ft. sea cargo container that was converted to accommodate the officers and detainees. It has so many discomforts like extreme heat during the day but the most appalling of all, is the lack of toilet. We discovered that Police officers have to beg neighbours to ease themselves. But at night when these kind neighbours are fast asleep and their compounds locked, (sorry dear readers), the female cops in particular have no other option but to pee on a gutter at the back of the container! How the Police and people in their custody do for the Big One, we could not tell and found the whole thing quite embarrassing to even probe further. But the fact of the matter is that we should not allow this to even happen in this day and age. To begin with, using a container as a Police post is completely out of place. Detainees with handcuffs are chained to metal bars and sit there in the open room watching activities taking place around them. That area needs serious policing and officers at the post did quite a symbolic and positive thing last year by getting opposing youth gang members to a Parley. They all gathered before the very Police post last year to make peace, which brought about relative sanity to two heavily populated communities. The Police must stop this idea of using containers as stationary location for their policing. They must erect relatively decent structures using other materials like timber in the worst case scenario but never a container. Marshall Street deserves a better structure not a container as Police post!
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