Two final year students of the School of Business Studies of the Federal College of Education (Technical), Gombe, Godwin Ladan and Raphael Ude Ajiribe, have been expelled and handed over to the police for allegedly raping a secondary school girl (names withheld) while on teaching practice.
Confirming the allegation and expulsion of the two students during a chat with journalists in Gombe, Registrar of the College, Alhaji Ahmed M. Dukku, said the college received the report from the authorities of the Government Girls Secondary School, Malala in Dukku Local Government Area of the state.
He said the two student teachers who raped the girl in their room were among students of the college sent to GGSS Malala on a six months teaching practice programme.
Authorities of GGSS Malala had set up a committee to probe the incident and a copy of the report was made available to the Provost of FCE, Gombe, which was also forwarded to the dean of students’ affairs for disciplinary action.
According to the Registrar, the Student’s Affairs Department, after conducting its own investigation, recommended the expulsion of the students to the management of the college after which the management acted on the two reports.
When contacted, the Police Public Relations Officer, PPRO, of the Gombe State Police Command, Fwaje Atajiri, confirmed the case, adding that the students have since been arraignedbefore a court.
Meanwhile, the Gombe State Water Board has blamed the acute water scarcity being experienced in many parts of the state capital in the last three months on power outage from the Power Holding Company of Nigeria, PHCN.
According to the General Manager of the board, Engineer Isa Mohammed, 95 per cent of the water scarcity was being experienced is caused by PHCN, which consistently deny the board steady power supply.
He told journalists that the state water board hardly gets power supply running for one hour and that any little power failure usually caused the board’s distribution water pipes to drain back to the plant, making it a tedious job for the board to refill its reservoirs and be able to pump water out.
The general manager said it was supplementing the poor supply by the use of the board’s generating plants and that most of them have broken down due to overload.
He said same is applicable to the five other boreholes of the board and expressed concern over the scarcity through announcements on air as it explains its predicament to the people.
When contacted over the allegation, the Technical Manager of the Gombe Business Office, Engineer Abdulkarim Sadique, denied starving the water board with power.
He, however, explained that the dedicated feeder for the board is always overloaded and that most times when the feeder has high voltage, the board’s engineers don’t know how to handle the high voltage and there is nothing the PHCN could do about situation.