To create awareness and reduce incidents of corruption and moral decadence in schools, the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC) Imo State office recently sensitized the teachers and students of Imo Government Girls Secondary School (GGSS) Owerri, Imo state on and against corruption and social vices
Addressing the students at the Assembly Ground, an Assistant Commissioner ICPC Imo state office, Mrs Chinwe Egbeocha said the sensitization programme was aimed at inculcating sound moral and ethical values in the lives of the students.
Enumerating the causes and effects of corruption, she said corruption is responsible for inadequate funding of schools’ laboratories and almost the dearth of public schools.
She encouraged the pupils not to engage in any act of corruption but to shun all forms of unethical practices such as stealing, cultism, cheating in examinations, giving false report against one another, bullying, extortion etc.
She also appealed to the students to stand up against corrupt practices even when their friends were involved and to report corruption to the appropriate authority.
Directing her words to the teachers, she restated the need to borrow a leaf from the Holy Book which encouraged the parents to train up their children in “the way they should go, and when they grow up, they will not depart from it”. She said once the youths grow up with integrity and sound moral values, the number of people to arrest and prosecute on the account of corruption would reduce significantly.
The Assistant Commissioner thereafter, spoke on the imperatives of Anti-Corruption Clubs in Secondary Schools stressing the objectives of the club to include the re-orientating the minds of students from believing that corruption is a way of life, enabling the students to imbibe the virtues of hardwork, honesty, transparency and integrity, and to change community concern into citizen action thereby making children to take positive steps in becoming change agents in their homes, schools and communities.
In her own speech, the principal of the school, Mrs Iwe M.C, expressed displeasure at the magnitude of corruption in Nigeria, saying that corruption is thriving even among school children.
She then emphasized the urgent need to catch the young ones free of corruption and expressed her gratitude to ICPC for its effort in tackling this hydra-headed monster head-on. Mrs. Iwe lauded the drive towards sanitizing the school system by the Commission as a good move which would help to check excesses of social vices in schools, and appointed two teachers to be the club advisers for the soon to be inaugurated Anti-Corruption Club in the school.