DOWEN College, Lekki, in Lagos, yesterday, said it was awaiting the directive of the state government to announce its resumption date.
This came as human rights lawyer, Mr. Femi Falana, SAN, said that his legal team will establish the ‘massive cover-up’ in the controversy trailing the death of Sylvester Oromoni.
This followed the controversies trailing the death of the 12-year-old student of the college, who died from injuries sustained during an alleged assault by five of his colleagues who wanted to initiate him into cultism.
But speaking on the school resumption on Channels Television’s Sunrise Daily, a member of the Advisory Board of the college, Folarin Shobo, said: “The government is keenly interested in the case, so we are bound by the decision of Lagos State Ministry of Education, the supervisory ministry. We are waiting for them to do the needful.
“We are not here to argue with the family, we are also mourning. The school, his teachers and his classmates are all mourning the loss of a bright young man. He was a boy that was full of great potentials.”
Shobo urged members of the public to engage the Oromoni case solely on the facts instead of what he described as emotions and sentiments.
He referred to the official autopsy reports presented by medical experts in Lagos and Warri, which the Nigerian Police Force had also described as “scientific evidence” to the case.
He said: “Anything could have happened on the road, but we handed him over to his guardian (not his father or mother) who took him to Warri by road.”
On the case of bullying in the college, Shobo said: “We don’t condone bullying. Once there is a report, the bully will be dismissed from the school, but as at the time the boy left the school, bullying was not at play.”
Lamenting that the case seemed to have cast a blemish on all the great contributions the school had invested in the nation, he said: “The school is 25 years old, and it has raised generations for this nation.”
Meanwhile, Mr Falana, who is the counsel to the Oromoni family, spoke on the autopsy report when he appeared on Channels Television’s Sunrise Daily.
Falana insisted that the state government did not have a Director of Public Prosecution on January 4 when the report was issued.
He said: “We are going to establish evidence of a massive cover-up. You say there wasn’t evidence that there was a secret society. How?
“We searched the suspect and didn’t find any tattoo, we didn’t find any insignia. Is that how to prove?
“From the press conference of the Commissioner of Police and from the legal advice that hoods out of the Ministry of Justice that was alleged to be issued by the Director of Public Prosecution, the Lagos State government did not have a Director of Public Prosecution on January 4 when that report came out of the ministry.”
To unravel the mystery behind the teenager’s death, the Lagos State Government initially arrested five students and two employees of the school accused of complicity in the death.
However, the accused were later cleared by the government on Wednesday last week, a situation that generated mixed feelings.
The government had cleared them following the Legal Advice of the Director of Public Prosecution, DPP, Ms Adetutu Oshinusi, that there was no prima facie case against the suspects.
