Member of Parliament (MP) for the Binduri Constituency and Deputy Minister for Works and Housing, Abdulai Abanga has wondered why students of the Binduri Community Day Senior High School (SHS) could go on the rampage over lack of food when they are day students who are fed at home.

The students had, on July 11, 2023, gone on a demonstration that quickly degenerated into chaos over the inability of the school to provide them lunch for over a month.

The District Education Director of the Ghana Education Service (GES) for Binduri had to personally intervene to calm down the irate students and then eventually ordered the closure of the school, only permitting final-year students to stay and finish up their mock WASSCE examination.

But speaking to Bolgatanga-based A1 Radio, Mr Abanga expressed utter shock at the development, castigating the students for acting unwisely and blaming the school authorities for not being proactive.

“It is a day school. So it is surprising to me that the students took this decision to riot because of the lunch.

They would normally be fed in the house before they come to school. And after school hours, when they go back home, the normal thing is that when they get to the house, they would be fed.

So for them to riot and decide not to study unless we serve them with their hot meal, I think we should advise the students that they would be losing looking at the number of days they would be out of school…We have to look at the management of the school because this is an issue. If it was ongoing, the stakeholders’ attention would have been drawn to it. I am sure that if I had heard about it much earlier, I could have followed up,” he said on A1’s Daybreak Upper East show Thursday, July 13, 2023.

Students of the school had been fed lunch until May 29, 2023, when the feeding stopped abruptly. The students had complained of the failure of the school management to resolve the issue after several petitions to them prompting them to stage the demonstration.