Audio By Carbonatix
Managing legal practitioner Gloria Ofori-Boadu of GOB Law Consult has called for a comprehensive security policy across Ghana's university campuses, saying she was left in a state of shock after witnessing the level of insecurity students face on a recent visit to Kumasi.
Ofori-Boadu made the remarks on Newsfile, joining a broader conversation on student safety that has gripped the country following a series of disturbing incidents, including the death by suicide of a Mfantsipim student, the emergence of a viral sex tape involving a teacher and a student of Bole Senior High School, and the murder of a Level 200 University of Cape Coast student, Innocentia Avinu.
Speaking on her experience near the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology campus, she said she encountered motorbike riders harassing her taxi driver on two separate occasions during a single trip — and was told by the driver that such incidents were routine and that police were largely unresponsive.
"I'm so shocked as I'm sitting here — can we have a university campus, all this infrastructure, and there's no security?" she said.
She noted that it was no surprise to her that KNUST had recorded the highest number of student casualties, citing what she described as a lawless environment surrounding the campus where motorbike riders routinely harass and threaten road users, sometimes snatching bags or physically assaulting pedestrians.
Ofori-Boadu called on university authorities and government to institute formal security policies at tertiary institutions, with mandatory orientation sessions to educate incoming students on how to protect themselves.
She urged that female students in particular be trained in basic personal safety responses — advising that they be taught to scream, fight, and run if confronted by an attacker — noting that women remained more vulnerable in unsafe campus environments.
Beyond physical safety, she raised concerns about cybersecurity, calling for ethics education and digital safety policies to be integrated into student orientation programmes across the country's universities.
The lawyer also turned her attention to the employment crisis facing Ghanaian graduates, warning that the absence of private sector development was leaving thousands of highly qualified young people idle at home.
"There are pools and pools — millions, thousands — of educated, brilliant Ghanaian persons, especially the youth, sitting at home," she said. "They have all the courses you can think of. Some have double masters, triple masters. Just in the house, waiting for the public sector."
She argued that the public sector, which employs only around ten to twelve percent of the population, could never absorb the volume of graduates being produced, and that the private sector was being neglected and, in some cases, actively undermined.
Ofori-Boadu said student vulnerability was compounded by inadequate basic training — citing road safety education as an example — and called for holistic interventions at all levels of Ghana's education system, from primary school through to tertiary.
She recalled a classroom tradition of teaching children to look left, look right, and look left again before crossing the road, lamenting that such foundational safety education had been lost over time.
"Students should be helped, they should be trained, they should be educated," she said. "There must be policies to help them."
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