KNUST Riot: We have decided to carry guns over stubborn students – UTAG

The University Teachers Association of Ghana (UTAG) has revealed that, lecturers at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) carry guns to work and would shoot any student who attempts to attack them, MyNewsGh.comreports.

National President of UTAG, Prof. Charles Ofosu Marfo says he carries his gun to the lecture hall and it’s an initiative adopted by the other lecturers to ensure personal safety at work after a students protest went violent in the school in 2018.

“If a student you are lecturing is able to set your car ablaze, the student has the capability of killing you and so next time, if I come to lecture such a student, I don’t have to smile”, he said on Kumasi-based Pure FM on Tuesday monitored by MyNewsGh.com

He was commenting on the aftermath of the violent student protest a year on when he said, “there are lecturers who go to work with their weapons. I’m telling you today. Yes, if I have registered my gun, then if I’m coming to class, I have to bring it along because the student I thought was a kid says he isn’t; he can set my car ablaze. I can tell you confidently, I am one of them”.

Protests against the conversion of three same-sex halls to unisex ones by some students of the university on October 22, 2018 degenerated into violence after the protesters clashed with the police.

School property and some cars belonging to some of the lecturers, costing an estimated GH¢1.7 million were vandalized; the Ashanti Regional Security Council consequently closed down the university and declared it a security zone.

There is uneasy calm at the university as residents of the University Hall (Katanga) and Unity Hall (Conti) continue to demand the reconversion of those two halls to all-male; but school authority says it would only work with the recommendations of the Chancellor’s Committee.

Source:MyNewsGh.com/