Will Utumishi Girls tragedy be the last of fatal school fires?

Bodys of the students who lost their lives during early thursday morning fire at Utumishi girls Acadamy in Gilgil Nakuru county. [Collins Oduor, Standard]

Thirty-five years separate the ashes of St Kizito Secondary School from those of Utumishi Girls. 19 girls died from a dormitory fire, a result of arson, in St Kizito in 1991. 16 perished in Utumishi on Thursday.

In between, the Commission of Inquiry established by President Moi after 26 students died in Bombolulu Girls' produced a meticulous report. Since the report, we have had three major fire disasters in schools. In 2002, the Kyanguli Secondary school fire killed 67 students. In 2017, 10 students died at Moi Girls, while in 2024, 21 students died at Hillside Endarasha Academy.

Between 1991 and 2026, governments have come and gone, and the same lethal mistakes have been repeated as though no child ever died in a fire before. The Bombolulu Commission, chaired by Bishop Lawi Imathiu, was no hasty exercise. After lengthy hearings, it produced recommendations so precise that reading them today is to read an indictment of the present.

The Commission found that the Bombolulu dormitory doors opened inwards, and that students had received no coaching on fire emergencies. It found a single, underqualified matron responsible for 146 sleeping girls, with no teacher residing on the school compound. It found lanterns, a paraffin tin lamp, matchboxes, and, most alarmingly, a gas burner and a bottle of ethanol stored in the dormitory after a Science Congress.  

The Commission's recommendations were unequivocal: exit doors must open outward, fire extinguishers and mandatory drills must be provided, dormitory capacities must be legally enforced, matrons must hold a minimum qualification, teachers must reside on the school compound, and a national Fire Service Act must be enacted. Those recommendations were ignored.

When the dormitory at Utumishi Girls Academy caught fire around 12:45 a.m. on Thursday, the echoes of 1998 were deafening. Again, a night fire while students slept in darkness. Again, questions about doors: a parent at the scene told NTV that one emergency exit remained locked, meaning only one of two exits was opened.  Interviewees indicated that most injuries resulted from students jumping from the upper floor because the doors were closed. Allegedly, only one matron was on duty. Again, the same inadequate supervision. Again, the Utumishi dormitory reportedly housed approximately 220 students. Again, no evidence of practised fire drills.

Perhaps the most damning failure is legislative. The Bombolulu Commission called for a Fire Service Act. Twenty-eight years later, Kenya still has no overarching Fire and Rescue Act. Various bills and national disaster management policies have been introduced in Parliament, but remain uncompleted.

Kenya Red Cross volunteers alongside homicide detectives retrieve some of the bodies of students who died following the deadly dormitory fire at Utumishi Girls High School in Gilgil, Nakuru County. [Kipsang Joseph, Standard]

The 2020 Auditor-General's performance audit on fire safety preparedness in secondary schools found widespread non-compliance. Many institutions lacked basic requirements such as serviced fire extinguishers, alarms, emergency exits, and regular drills. Half of public schools had never conducted proper fire safety assessments. Interior CS Kipchumba Murkomen confirmed that the Utumishi fire was contained by 3:00 a.m. through a multi-agency operation. That response came too late for sixteen children.

President Ruto's administration now faces the same test as every administration before it: will this tragedy produce genuine reform, or merely another report? Families of the twenty-one boys who died in the Hillside Endarasha fire in 2024 have already sued the government, accusing it of negligence and dereliction of duty. They argue that strict enforcement of safety regulations could have averted the fire.

That lawsuit remains before the High Court. Now the Utumishi families will join them. And the Imathiu Commission report will be pulled from some archive shelf, dusted off, and read aloud in court, a document written twenty-eight years ago that reads as if it were written yesterday. We columnists, will wax lyrical about how unfortunate this is and then move on to more exciting topics. The Bombolulu students are now women in their forties. Some may be parents of children now in boarding schools.

They must wonder whether their own children are any safer than they were. The answer, tragically, is that not enough has changed. The doors still open inward. The matrons are still too few. The drills are still not done. The Fire Service Act has not been passed. Kenya has buried its children twice: once in fire, and again in indifference. The question is whether Utumishi will be the last such burial.