A committee is investigating scores of students at the Zuarungu Senior High School in the Upper East region concerning a video clip showing a crowd of first-year students being flogged by their seniors and forced to simulate sexual intercourse with one another on the school’s premises.
Sources say the seniors ordered the juniors to simulate the sex acts during the afternoon hours of Saturday, 1 February 2025, as an ‘opening ceremony’ ahead of a ‘ninos’ night’ programmed to take place hours later.
A ‘ninos’ night’ is a social reception seniors are allowed to hold in some boarding senior high or technical schools in Ghana to welcome new arrivals to the campus. Usually, it is an occasion for entertainment, where the first-year students are paraded in some odd dress codes, have their faces dabbed with mostly white powder and made to sing weird songs on campus at night. It almost bears a resemblance to a Halloween night.
But the acts captured in the video clip have drawn so much public condemnation the authorities reportedly are now considering expunging ‘ninos night’ from the campus culture. The seniors involved are also likely to be sent back home and made to write their final examinations from there, according to sources.
The headmistress, Umuhari Adams Abubakari, did not answer the telephone calls placed to her by the author of this report. This writer also put in a telephone call to the Upper East regional director of education, Bright Lawoe; he did not answer the call. Further calls placed to the school’s parent-association leadership and the Bolgatanga East District Directorate similarly did not yield any results.
When the Food and Drugs Authority (FDA) visited the school unannounced in April, last year, and impounded some expired food items reportedly being fed to the boarders, this author incurred the displeasure of the regional director, the headmistress and some other authorities for writing about it.
Victims of sex-act simulation speak
On Tuesday, 4 February 2025, Media Without Borders spoke to 15 girls and 18 boys among the first-year students who simulated the sex acts under duress.
They said they were made to stage the acts on the school’s grassless football field. One of them said the seniors were about to force them to undress on the field before a teacher suddenly arrived and the seniors fled in different directions.
“They asked every girl to lie on their bellies on the ground, tied a boy to each of the girls and instructed the boy to have sex with you,” a girl said.
“It was difficult to say no because they were whipping those who refused with belts,” a boy told this media outlet.
A girl recounted how a boy was made to lie on her back and flogged while he was being told to fondle her in the front. She said she was bruised in one of her thighs from a stroke of the belt meant for the boy.
“They asked us to fondle the girls’ breasts hard and have sex with them. They asked you to do it well. They whipped you with the metal heads of their belts if you disobeyed their orders,” stated a boy.
“They were initiating us. The form-three girls would look for first-year girls and form-three boys would provide first-year boys. They would then tie them together and ask the first-year boys to have sex with the first-year girls,” another victim explained.
The victims said they were traumatised and keen to meet their own families to share their experiences with them.
“Ninos’ nights are for entertainment, not for bullying. They whipped us. Those who did not have a partner were forced to use the ground as their sex partner. They tell you to have sex with the ground and do it hard,” one of the victims said with fury.
The committee’s investigations have taken two days so far and it may continue on Wednesday (today) because the students involved are many.
Expert talks about way forward
The development at the Zuarungu Senior High School comes at a time Ghanaians are still reeling from the sight of a senior student of the Accra Academy flogging a junior with a cutlass in a recent video.
But the executive director of the Centre for Traditional Leadership, Culture, Conflict, Law and Development (CCCLaD), Peter Apuko Awuni, says both the victims and the perpetrators involved in the Zuarungu SHS and Accra Academy need help.
“All the school authorities who are assigned the responsibility of supervision must be closer to the students. If the teachers who are supposed to be doing the supervision were that close, these molestations and abuses we see would not happen.
“Secondly, the review of the education system or the free senior high school policy is something that must start now. It is sad that the school wouldn’t have known but for the recording done by the students themselves. School managements of all secondary schools in Ghana must pay attention to bullying, which is currently happening,” he said.
The executive director further stated that punishing the perpetrators without getting to “the root cause of bullying and abuse” on the campus was a knee jerk reaction to a problem that should be uprooted once and for all. He said there should be “conscious efforts to reorient students” through guidance and counseling units in the light of the position of the law against bullying.
“All the students who are perpetrators and all the students who are victims need psychosocial support. The perpetrators themselves are victims of circumstances, ignorantly doing what they may have suffered themselves as victims and now perpetrators. Perhaps, there are even worse ones that we haven’t even seen.
“The school in partnership with the GES (Ghana Education Service) and parents should set up an all-inclusive committee to review all the happenings surrounding the school so that when the implementation comes about, everybody is in the know, everybody supports it and it’s in line with the GES policies,” he said.
Source: Edward Adeti/Media Without Borders/mwbonline.org/Ghana
