Emergency drills should be conducted more regularly

The events at Strathmore University this week were most tragic. My heart goes out to the family of the staffer who lost her life and to the injured students. May they fully recover and be able to return to their studies despite their unimaginable trauma. In a country where blame-gaming is a national pastime, the instinctive reaction has been to blame the university. They should have warned the students, it is said. Why were the police not fully engaged, others wonder.

While we await the experts to review whether the university followed proper protocols in managing the drill, I urge that we use this unfortunate event as a basis for reflection on our emergency preparedness and see it a wake-up call to re-engineer our reactions to emergencies. Since the bombing of the American Embassy in 1996, up to the Garissa University shootings, we now know that we are vulnerable to terror attacks. I pray I am proved wrong, but I am convinced that the calm season we are experiencing is a lull before the storm; sooner than later there will be a terror attack. If there is anything that the attacks in Paris, Yola Nigeria, Beirut and San Bernardino have shown, it is that terrorism is the great equaliser; there is no absolute protection against terrorism-related attacks.