Let Utumishi Girls fire trigger rethink on school safety

Parents and guardians walk outside the Utumishi Girls Academy following the deadly fire in Gilgil, May 28, 2026. [AFP]

How governments react to crises says a lot about the humanity and competence of those in charge. This was the conclusion most people made as stories trickled out from the fire at Utumishi Girls Academy in Gilgil.

As of Friday morning, 16 girls were declared dead from the fire, with dozens injured.

As the nation mourns with the affected families, two clips in particular, both involving fathers who appeared to have lost their daughters, stood out to me. In one, a uniformed police officer tightly hugged the distraught dad as he asked the hard questions no parent ever wants to ask.

In a second clip, police officers wielding batons pushed parents around, with one shirtless dad left pounding the ground in anger; as officers ordered him to “relax.”

Most Kenyans would agree that we deserve to live in the world presented in the first clip. A world in which we hold tightly to our humanity, and liberally share it with fellow Kenyans.

This is a world in which we care about each other’s pain and suffering, and are not afraid to give the grieving a shoulder to lean on. It is a world that cultivates dignity and human flourishing. Again, we deserve to live in that world.

Crises happen. That is a given even with the best of preventative measures in place. However, it is how we respond that matters. The second clip defined the predominant mode of the government’s response to the fire. Parents were left waiting for hours before they could get information. Senior government officials’ whims took precedent over the desperate need for information, even if just about process, among grieving parents.

Instead of compassion, there was the usual brutality that betrays a country that long lost its soul. All this at a site where 16 pupils had just perished.

Then there was the question of preventative measures, in this case fire safety. For how much longer are we going to have fire incidences (regardless of the cause) in which pupils were locked in their dormitories?

Is government’s safety manual just another document that people absentmindedly wrote, discussed in countless useless meetings, and then shelved?

Who is in charge of the enforcement of the school fire safety protocol? And has he/she already  resigned after the Utumishi Girls fire? For how much longer are we going to keep losing our children to preventable tragedies?

Going back to the two clips, as a country we must choose how we want to live. Do we want a society full of humanity and in which we care for one another, or do we want to live like unthinking brutes forever captured by the whims of a thieving and incompetent ruling class.

I hope that we choose humanity over brutality. That is the only way that we can begin to put in the preventative measures to ensure tragedies like what we witnessed on Thursday do not happen again.

May the souls of the girls who perished rest in peace. And may God give comfort to their families.

-The writer is a professor at Georgetown University