By Septimus Senessie in Kono
Dozens of primary school pupils at the Koidu School for the Blind in the eastern Kono district on Monday started an indefinite sit-down strike against “the poor living conditions in the school.” Their action, which brought the school to a lock-down, resulted in the closing-down of classrooms grinding the school to a halt. They chanted in anger saying, “Enough is enough! We don’t want to see Mr. Gbessay [the founder and proprietor] and his staff. We are tired of them in this school!” The senior prefect of the school, Emmanuel Tuwah told Politico that they were protesting against their school administrators over their poor living conditions including poor feeding, poor toilet facilities, alleged embezzlement of school fees subsidies and donated materials and the sale of a portion of their school land to private individual by the school administration. Tuwah also made allegations against the person of the deputy head teacher of the school saying he had impregnated one of their colleagues. He said the whole issue came to a head when cooking utensils, bedding and mosquito-treated bed nets were donated to the school a few days ago by the German technical team, GIZ. He alleged that only few were given to the pupils with the rest distributed among the school administration without their consent. He said the female dormitory building funded by Helen Keller International and the Sababu funded 6-classroom block building, were poorly constructed blaming it on the school administration. Deputy head teacher, Sahr Simeon Thomas strongly denied the allegations against him and the entire school administration describing the action of the pupils as “ingratitude and inciting.” He denied impregnating any pupil saying the blind person in question was his wife whom he legally go married to in Kabala and brought to the school for non-formal education. This he said was nothing but a personal attack on his personality. The deputy head teacher also denied any allegations of embezzlement in the school. He said they were operating the school under difficult circumstance with so much delay in the arrival of the school fees subsidies which he said were sometimes not forthcoming. Thomas said that despite all the difficulty they were still trying to ensure the kids had two square meals a day and also give them most of the facilities a boarding home should have even if not enough. He denied that they sold the school land saying the plot in question was donated to the Tankoro authorities for the construction of a hospital.
