OSHAKATI – Teachers and learners at Erundu Secondary School in Oshakati were shocked when they found an eerie and threatening message scribbled in blood at the school on Tuesday morning this week.
The graffiti message at the entrance of one of the school blocks reads: “I will kill you!!” What created even more consternation among the teachers is the fact that police forensic investigators who were summoned to the school were unable to lift any finger prints for analysis, because the person who wrote the message appears to have taken extra care not to leave any evidence, including fingerprints.
The principal of the school Pinehas Shipena who described the incident as “strange and unusual” said although the school will not take the message lightly, it is difficult to determine who is responsible for the threat or for whom it is meant. “It is difficult to tell, because we have learners that stay at school up to 16h30, waiting to be picked up by their parents or by taxis and often I find the yard full of children playing as they access the school through the holes in the fence. So, it is difficult to tell if it is one of our learners or an outsider who did that,” said Shipena. Erundu Secondary School has been in the news before over alleged drug use among learners at the school. Ever since that time messages aimed at discouraging learners from using drugs are written all over the school walls.
Shipena said although it was never proven that there are learners using drugs since he joined the school a few months back, there has been several reports about learners using drugs or at least there are suspicions to that effect. “One cannot prove that a person is using drugs, you have to catch them in the act, which is difficult. But the behaviour shows that this learner is under some substance. But in this case a message scribbled in blood is very serious. Graffiti appears in many forms, but when it is in blood it is worrisome. You don’t know if a person came with a container of blood or whether he or she took blood from their own body (sic),” said Shipena.
By Helvy Shaanika