Eight deaths in one school and life goes on? How cruel and insensible!

Monday, September 23, 2019, was supposed to be a good day at school for pupils at Precious Talents Top School in Nairobi’s Dagoretti South. And then a one-storey classroom block came tumbling down on the poor little children, killing eight of them.

This is the saddest thing that could ever happen to a parent. When you send your child to school, you do not expect them to return home in a casket.

It is also the worst thing to happen to a child. School is supposed to be fun. It is supposed to be an enjoyable learning experience in which you go through a journey of self-discovery and make lifelong friends and memories as you collect experiences that will shape your life.

Now, in our typical Kenyan fashion, we will mourn these innocent children – whose only crime was to make it to class for their early morning preps – and then, by next week, we will have moved on to other pressing matters, such as the Kibra by-election.

We will leave eight families to deal with the loss of their children – some of whom were the only hope of their families – and we will not care how they will deal with that loss.

Eight mothers will wake up on Monday morning next week without children to prepare for school because those children died where they were supposed to feel safest: at school.

Our leaders, who took this opportunity to finally come out of the woodwork and bore us stiff with their crocodile tears, will have moved on to their Kieleweke and Tangatanga activities, and it will be business as usual.

The owner of the school might manage to manoeuvre the system, walk scot-free, sell the premises and re-invent himself and consequently start a new school elsewhere, perhaps in Njoro, Nakuru County, where nobody will pick out his face.

Still, eight lives will not have been accounted for, and I will be surprised if someone takes the fall for the mess that left eight mothers bereaved.

We all know this cycle too well. Education Cabinet Secretary George Magoha, having visited the scene and condemned the matter in the strongest terms possible, has announced an inquiry by the Directorate of Criminal Investigations into the matter.

Will anyone ever follow up on the results of the investigation?

Prof Magoha and other government bureaucrats will quietly go back to their air-conditioned, sound-proofed, wall-to-wall carpeted offices.

But this does not need to happen. This conversation should not end with the news cycle.

We need to have a sustained conversation on why children are left to die at school and make sure that the persons responsible pay for the deaths of these innocent little ones.

We need to use this tragedy as an opportunity to ask ourselves tough questions about the state of Kenyan schools.

In 2019, children spend nearly the entire break time queuing outside toilets because there are not enough facilities.

We still have children sitting on the floor in a country where the government has promised to digitise schools and the learning experience.

It is completely unacceptable that, in 2019, children are dying painfully when classrooms collapse on them and we move on to the next matter as if nothing happened.

This is the time to talk about just how unsafe our schools are, how they operate without fences, and how children are forced to learn in overcrowded classrooms and understaffed institutions.

The ministry of education perhaps needs to tell us why there are not enough public schools in some constituencies, and why public schools do not exist at all in areas such as Dagoretti South.

Many might not remember this, but it has been two years since we lost 10 girls in a terrible fire at Moi Girls School in Kibra Constituency, Nairobi.

There are parents who still spend sleepless nights today battling emotions and nightmares knowing that they will never get to the bottom of what happened to their children in that deadly hostel.

Let us not normalise death in schools. It is not okay for children to have their worst life experiences in school. It is not okay to put our children in unfit structures and expect them to excel at school.

We need to do something, and we need the Ministry of Education awake on this.

Ms Chege is the director of the Innovation Centre at Aga Khan University Graduate School of Media and Communications.