When Our Children Are Hurt, Accountability Must Stop Being Optional

There is a pain that no parent should ever be asked to carry: the pain of sending a child to school alive, hopeful, and full of promise, only to receive news that something terrible has happened under the watch of adults who were supposed to protect them. Schools are not just buildings. They are places where parents deposit trust. They are places where children are expected to learn, sleep, grow, dream, and return home safely. When that trust is broken, we must not reduce the matter to sympathy alone. Sympathy is necessary, but it is not enough.

The Utumishi fire tragedy should shake the conscience of the nation. It should force us to confront a painful question that we often avoid after tragedies involving our children: who was responsible, what did they fail to do, and why should accountability not follow? Too often, Kenya mourns loudly for a few days, offers condolences, waits for statements, watches leaders visit scenes of tragedy, and then slowly moves on. The families are left with permanent grief while institutions return to business as usual. That cycle must end.

As long as we refuse to hold school management responsible whenever children are harmed under their care, we will continue sending a dangerous message to principals, head teachers, boards of management, and education officials: that negligence can be explained away, that failure can be buried under public relations, and that the lives of children can be treated as unfortunate statistics. That is unacceptable. Children are not numbers. They are sons, daughters, siblings, classmates, friends, and the future of this country.

When parents hand over their children to a school, they are not merely paying fees or following the education system. They are transferring daily responsibility to an institution. That institution has a duty to provide safe classrooms, safe dormitories, safe compounds, safe supervision, working emergency systems, and a culture where risks are detected and corrected before disaster strikes. A child in school should not have to depend on luck to survive. Safety must be planned, budgeted for, inspected, enforced, and taken seriously every single day.

The problem in many institutions is that safety is often treated as an afterthought. It becomes important only after tragedy. Fire exits are discussed after a fire. Dormitory inspections are emphasized after children are harmed. Emergency drills become fashionable after the nation is mourning. Repair budgets are remembered after something collapses. This reactive culture is one of the reasons tragedies keep finding us unprepared. A serious country does not wait for children to suffer before asking whether systems work.

The first responsibility must sit with those directly in charge of schools. Principals and head teachers must understand that leadership is not only about academic performance, mean grades, discipline, fundraising, or public image. Leadership is also about the physical safety and emotional well-being of every child under their care. A school that produces good grades but cannot guarantee basic safety is not a successful school. It is a dangerous institution wearing the clothes of success.

Boards of management must also be questioned. They cannot exist only for meetings, signatures, procurement decisions, and ceremonial oversight. Their duty includes ensuring that school facilities meet basic safety standards, that dormitories are not death traps, that emergency exits are clear, that electrical systems are inspected, that children are not overcrowded in unsafe spaces, and that the administration does not ignore obvious risks. A board that fails to ask hard questions before tragedy should not be allowed to hide after tragedy.

Education officials at county, regional, and national levels must equally carry their share of responsibility. Inspection should not be a box-ticking exercise. It should not be a predictable visit where everything is cleaned up for appearances. It should be thorough, honest, and consequential. If a school is unsafe, it should be ordered to fix the risk immediately. If the risk is serious, children should not be kept there until danger becomes disaster. The duty of the State is not to mourn children after failure. It is to protect them before failure.

Accountability must therefore be more than a press statement. It must be specific. Who inspected the school? What did the inspection report say? Were concerns raised? Were they acted upon? Were there previous warnings? Were safety rules complied with? Were facilities approved despite defects? Was there overcrowding? Were emergency routes usable? Were staff properly trained on crisis response? These are not questions of politics. They are questions of life and death.

Whenever a tragedy happens to children in school, investigations must be fast, independent, and transparent. Kenyans should not be given vague promises that the matter is being looked into. Families deserve answers. The public deserves answers. Most importantly, children still in school deserve reforms that prevent the next tragedy. An investigation that produces no consequences is just another document for shelves. Accountability that cannot be felt is not accounta