The Lagos state police command has stated its readiness to partner with the Students’ Union Government (SUG) in all the tertiary institutions in the state to curb the menace of youth restiveness and cultism which is now assuming a worrying dimension.
The Commissioner of Police, Lagos state, Mr. Edgal Imohimi who disclosed this in a meeting with the Students Union leaders held at the command’s headquarters, Ikeja, Lagos on Saturday said the students leaders were invited to the meeting considering the strategic position they occupy and the experience they had in running their various students union governments.
Imohimi said,”What we are doing here today, am sure will be recorded for posterity. I called you here today to seek your support, your cooperation, your partnership. I came to this command as a Commissioner of Police and I hit the ground running from one town hall meeting to the other trying to sell my policing plan.
“In all my town hall meetings traversing the entire Lagos state, one issue always come up and that is the issue of youth restiveness/cultism. Most communities that I have visited have told me that Commissioner, we don’t have issue of crime, most of our neighborhoods now are safe but this scourge of cultism has become so bad that if you don’t come to our aid, it will consume all of us.
“In all neighborhoods in Lagos now, you have young boys between 14, 15, 16, not even up to the constitutionally recognized age of 18 being recruited for cult related activities. These young boys, their thinking have not yet been formed, so they are easily indoctrinated, they do not know the consequences of their actions since they are supposed to be under guidance and mentorship, they cannot even be held legally accountable for some of their actions.
“It now behooves on all of us to come up with solutions, to come up with strategies on how we can take back out neighborhoods from some individuals who have taken it upon themselves to go from community to community to set up cult groups and recruit our young children, junior brothers and sisters”.
The Lagos police boss noted that worried by this trend, he went in search of a better group to partner with to tackle this monster of cultism and concluded that partnering with the students union government in various higher institutions in the state would do the magic.
“The sheer fact that most of you were instrumental in bringing down the rate of cultism in your various institutions means that if you offer yourselves in partnership with the police, you can at least help us or guide us on how we are going to equally bring down the issue of cultism in neighborhoods around your institutions.
“The intelligence at my disposal is that there are some student, they call themselves students but they never graduate from the universities or schools or higher institutions, every year you see their faces, they are the ones going into the neighborhoods to recruit these young ones.
“Are we going to raise up our hands in despair or are we going to partner and identity them, come up with a strategy to stop it?”, he queried.
Respondents at the meeting while commending the Commissioner of Police for the initiative to partner students’ union leaders called for the establishment of youth centres across the state where the youths would be educated and enlightened on the dangers of cultism as most of them were innocently cajoled into joining cultism.
They frowned at the attitude of some policemen who indulge in negative acts that belittle their profession like drinking and smoking India Hemps with the hoodlum calling on the CP to carry out sensitization programmes for the officers so as to get them refocused as well as build public trust and confidence in the police so as to easily get credible information from them.
They also called for policemen to be on the street, relate with people and become easily approachable, that way they would be able to extract needed information from the public even as they suggested that policemen should be made to be mobile as against stationing themselves regularly at a particular spot as hoodlums can easily avoid those identified spots when they commit crime thereby beating the police to crime.
They further advised the police to keep an eye on the schools’ administration, the lecturers as they were the ones that sponsor these young ones into cultism and always escape justice as they cannot be easily linked to the crime the young ones committee.
They also called for institutionalization of drug test at all levels for students in tertiary institutions, that way, culpable ones are identified and punished as a deterrent to others while as calling for welfare packages in the institutions to assist the indigent ones cope with their studies and keep them away from crime.
Schools that were in attendance to the meeting includes; the University of Lagos, Lagos State Polytechnic, Adeniran Ogunsanya College of Education, Caleb University and Yaba College of Technology.
Others are; Ronik Polytechnic, Lagos State College of Health Technology and the Federal College of Fisheries and Marine Technology among others.
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