Kakamega pupils have not yet healed

Deputy President William Ruto wishes one of the students injured during the stampede at Kakamega Primary School good health, at Kakamega hospital on February 4, 2020. PHOTO | FILE | NATION MEDIA GROUP

What you need to know:

  • For communities to heal their wounds and rebuild social structures after an emergency or a traumatic incident, they must get the proper help needed.
  • A transition needs structural, financial, learning and human resources. To successfully transition, we must deal with each of these structures.

We should all be concerned about the quick way Kakamega Primary School resumed normal programming after 14 of their pupils just died in an odd and sudden manner.

From the moment this unfortunate incident occurred to when these children were laid to rest, so many questions remained unanswered.

I still cannot wrap my head around the fact that perfectly healthy children died from a stampede that hasn’t been properly addressed.

Who is responsible and how do we stop a reoccurrence? To have these children back in school a few days after they witnessed and experienced the deaths of their friends and classmates in this cold-blooded manner is astounding.

We all know how much death is traumatising and difficult to process as adults, what about children?

Is there anyone concerned about these children’s well-being; emotional and mental? To be back so soon in the very place where their friends and classmates lost their lives and expected to carry on as if this incident was just a bad day is unthinkable.

COUNSELLING

I watched one of the parents of the deceased children describe how traumatising this entire experience has been, weeping bitterly and asking the same questions that we are all asking: accountability, support and a way forward, because this was not a small incident.

Who has even thought about the teachers and what they are silently going through? It must be crippling trying to teach while an obvious wound hovers everywhere.

Issues surrounding the Kakamega stampede are many but key among them that need immediate attention is granting psychosocial support to the victims. This will help those affected by the traumatic deaths to deal with the existing wounds.

For communities to heal their wounds and rebuild social structures after an emergency or a traumatic incident, they must get the proper help needed, or else they’ll turn into passive victims instead of survivors.

SUFFICIENT RESOURCES

There needs to be an intentional action to ensure Kakamega Primary School and its community work towards healing that leads to another important issue to be addressed — the state of public schools.

Public schools do not have enough structures to safely and adequately accommodate the increased number of learners.

The poor pupil-teacher ratio suggests that each teacher has to be responsible for a large number of pupils in classrooms that can’t accommodate the increasing numbers.

Children cannot be going to school to die so we can tick the 100 per cent transition box.

A transition needs structural, financial, learning and human resources. To successfully transition, we must deal with each of these structures.

Death is not the price that children should pay for getting an education.

Scheaffer Okore is a policy analyst; [email protected]