Kenyans dying as greed, laxity reign supreme
What you need to know:
Kenyans have asked this before and I will repeat it again, where does the buck stop when it comes to accountability?
The National Construction Authority is supposed to regulate and bring sanity in the construction industry, but why isn't this happening and what is the role of the county government?
Who ensures that people don't have to go through more trauma than they already have?
In many countries across the world, buildings mostly collapse because of unavoidable natural causes like earthquakes, hurricanes and mudslides. But in Kenya, buildings mostly collapse because of avoidable causes linked to corruption, negligence and contempt of people. Residential houses, especially those in highly populated urban areas, continue being death traps when they shouldn't be and no one seems concerned about finding a lasting solution.
ACCEPTABLE CULTURE
As we are currently dealing with the loss of eight pupils in Nairobi, we must honestly address the contempt that drives the negligence in construction. The death of the children wasn't an accident, just like the many others before. The way we constantly choose negligence and money over people's lives by making it an acceptable culture is immoral and illegal. We have lost so many lives to unregulated and unchecked construction that seems to be normalised. The fact that high-rise buildings go beyond the legally accepted number of storeys without adequate safety measures is unacceptable.
Watching Kenyans desperately digging through the rubble for the children's bodies was particularly difficult and to imagine that hours after the building had collapsed help wasn't yet in sight leaves such a chilling feeling. These were children who'd woken up to do something that shouldn't endanger their lives — going to school—but it ended their lives and traumatised the rest. Everyday, poor Kenyans are forced to negotiate their wellbeing and safety within the frameworks of poor leadership as one is without an end exposed to numerous man-made risks.
LITMUS TEST
If a country is not safe for children then it isn't safe for anyone because children should be our litmus test for safety, security, health, education etc. If these services aren't good enough for children, they aren't good. Period. We should, therefore, question why accountability and prevention of management negligence aren't learnt even when we have many lessons to learn from. We should question why Kenya constantly reminds its people that the lives of its most vulnerable don't matter. We must ask these questions because the ultimate price of bad leadership and negligence is death and more specifically, the death of innocent people.
MORE TRAUMA
Kenyans have asked this before and I will repeat it again, where does the buck stop when it comes to accountability? The National Construction Authority is supposed to regulate and bring sanity in the construction industry, but why isn't this happening and what is the role of the county government? Who ensures that people don't have to go through more trauma than they already have?
While there is the obvious blame game of who should have done what and when, we should remember that there are children who are afraid of sitting in a classroom. Children are paying for the failure of officials with the painful traumas they'll carry with them for a long time. So, while we are crafting language to sooth the disaster, our children already have scars and I am not sure what we will tell them because sorry isn't going to cut it.
The writer is a policy analyst. [email protected]
