A fire has just razed down a student facility at Hillside Endarasha Primary School in Kieni West, Nyeri County.
At the time of going to press, 17 students had tragically lost their lives, while 13 more were battling life threatening injuries at health facilities in and around Mt Kenya region.
Political leaders were the first to run into their draft folders and send in their words of deep sorrow and emotional support, as is the norm, before they go back to sleep, until another tragedy strikes.
President William Ruto was among the first to commiserate with the families of affected victims, calling the news devastating, and issued instructions for the relevant authorities to leave no stone unturned and finish up the job by holding those responsible to full account.
You can tell the responses he has received from the general public are neither flattering to his show of remorse nor empathetic to his hollow assurance.
Kenyans, by and large, are resilient people. They wake up before first light to trek to their nearest employment bureau with nothing but hope in their withering veins, breaking their backs for daily pittance, all for the love of God and the burning desire to change home.
They put their kids through school under the most difficult of economic circumstances, sacrificing life’s comfort for a hopeful future.
At the very least, the state is expected to protect life and property to keep this desire alive. In the case of Hillside Endarasha Primary School, it has failed in both.
In egalitarian societies where shame is a constitutional vice and guilt eats up those who sleep on their God-given jobs, the President’s statement should’ve opened with the news that he has accepted the resignation of the entire chain of education officials who slept on the job; from the officers in charge of Standards and Norms, to the guys entrusted with Quality Assurance and School Safety.
We would’ve expected the County Government to answer a few questions on why their emergency response teams took donkey years to arrive at the scene, but we will leave that to the Nyeri County MCAs to tell us if they’re satisfied with the slow-motion.
School safety is not something you write in political statements and go home to sleep having ticked a box.
At the Ministry of Education, school safety is supposed to be the number one priority area in the evaluation of standards and practices, because without learners to occupy the classrooms there would be no school in the first place.
No parent, regardless of their situation of helplessness, would enroll their child at a school unsure of whether they shall see off the term in one piece or return home in a lifeless form.
It goes without saying that it doesn’t matter how ivy your school’s league is or awards it has earned in extra and co-curricular activities – when a parent is asked to choose between good grades and death, and bad grades and life; there would be no blinking twice on the button they would press.
A government that issues operating licenses to schools without due diligence on occupational health and safety markers is a government that views human life in abstract form, and do not deserve the empathy it is asking from the families of those affected by the latest tragedy.
In glossy policy documents that is the envy of education stakeholders, the government rightly considers school safety as an integral and indispensable component of the teaching and learning process – both for the teachers who earn a living from the safety and comfort of the school environment, and the students who inhabit the learning space and who consider the school environment home away from home.
It acknowledges that, indeed, no meaningful teaching and learning can take place in an environment that is unsafe and insecure to both learners and staff, and that is the farthest you will go in mining goodwill from them.
It has been said, by those who went to school to study public policy, that Kenya has the greatest thinkers of any country in this region.
We have a human resource base that is the envy of the world, and with a slight switch-on in the right environment our brains can launch a rocket ship into space on low maintenance. They’re not adding salt – it is what it is.
What we have in brain power we lack in government goodwill. There are world class public policy documents that have been written on occupational health and safety in our basic institutions of learning, approved by the Ministry of Education and vetted for mass quality assurance rollout.
On paper, our schools are the safest learning environments any parent would ever desire to trust their children with. In reality, you would be lucky to find a head teacher who knows how to pull the pin of a fire extinguisher, if at all it is there in the first place at their school.
The reader gets the jarring feeling that some consultant was probably contracted to bill the Ministry for their ability to put two difficult English words together, to prove to our education partners that we know what we’re doing, and after banking their mouth-watering cheque, the document was binned at the back of a rusty shelf somewhere waiting for another taskforce to polish it for a newer money-minting version.
There is no use churning out academic literature, year-on-year, without accompanying the commitment with government goodwill to oversee the full implementation of the taskforce reports on school safety. School safety needs not to be redefined, we all know what it is and experts have already informed us what needs to be done to guarantee it.
If the Ministry of Education quality assurance department is not interested in undertaking measures to minimize or eliminate risky conditions or threats that may cause accidents, bodily injury as well as emotional and physiological distress; then there’s no use writing political statements and rushing to schools each time an accident occurs.
All the Ministry of Education needs to do is to inform Kenyans that when it comes to the safety and security of their klids in schools, they should know they’re on their own, and Kenyans would go home tonight to sleep soundly knowing they need to start making personal arrangements to guarantee their safety and security outside government intervention. This is the time for us to be told things as they are. We will be more than happy to adjust to the new painful reality as we wait for the second coming of Jesus.
