This fatalism must end! All life is precious

This past week 14 children were killed and numerous others injured in a stampede at a school in Kakamega.

Our political leaders got into their helicopters and went to make speeches at the school and then flew back to Nairobi.

Local politicians went for their photo ops at the site and made the obligatory promises to pay for one thing or another and went off to more important business.

The rest of us made the usual social media noise and then moved on to more juicy stories. In the meantime families of the affected children are spending days grieving for their loved ones.

It is a time of darkness for them as they ask themselves what they could have done differently to safeguard the lives of their children.

They have been forced to come to terms with the reality that all the hopes and dreams they had for their children are no more.

One can only imagine the pain and despair they will have to live with for the rest of their lives. We can only wish them strength to tide them over in these trying moments.

SAFETY COMPROMISED

However, we cannot continue like this as a nation. We cannot blame these deaths on nature or some external forces.

We cannot pretend that the deaths were inevitable and we as a nation could do nothing to prevent them. By many accounts it is clear that these deaths were preventable.

There must exist in some place standards for school structures housing hundreds of children, and these standards obviously provide for the health and safety of learners and their teachers.

The heartbreaking accounts of the stampede that led to the deaths of these little ones reveal, even to the lay mind, problems in the school that compromised the health and safety of everyone using the structures.

There are suggestions that the design of the building made it difficult for large groups of people to move along the corridors and staircases quickly and safely.

There are suggestions that the classes were too large for any one teacher to control effectively.

Overall, it is unconscionable that after the tragedy those in charge are content to issue platitudinous statements and go back to their business as usual, as if nothing has happened.

WHO'S RESPONSIBLE

It is clear that we have decided to place the responsibility for this atrocity on entities beyond our control, meaning that nobody will bear any degree of responsibility for it.

This attitude is in keeping with our traditional mindset in which we will just shrug our shoulders and be thankful that the tragedy did not directly affect us.

We will look skywards and place the matter before our favourite deity and then go on with our lives.

Should we meet the affected families, we will be quick to reassure them that “it shall be well”, when in truth we know that there will always be a void in their lives.

Losing a child is a most painful thing for a parent, but losing a child in the one place outside of our homes where we expect ultimate safety and security is unthinkable.

We must end this fatalism that feeds our cavalier attitude towards the lives of our people, and begin living by our constitutional standard that everyone has the right to life, and no life should be thought to be less precious than another.

Lukoye Atwoli is Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Moi University School of Medicine; [email protected]