Over time we have developed a culture of no consequences for criminal acts. Violence has also become the “solution” to our issues. We need to have a national dialogue on values killed by our brand of politics.
As in 2016, secondary school students are once again burning down their own classrooms and dormitories.
Books of great monetary and sentimental value are going up in flames. Beds and bedding become twisted frames and ash. Suitcases, clothes, and documents are incinerated.
Afterwards, students, teachers, education administrators, police and parents weave in and out of the smoke rising to the sky, picking through the debris with sticks, putting out coals that are still smouldering.
It’s a black wasteland where not just material things are reduced to debris, but where the very idea of school as our society’s reservoir of reason and humanitarianism goes up in smoke too.
The cost of rebuilding these schools will be borne by parents who are mostly dirt poor. But in the end, society pays a heavy price as schools become places that breed unreason, intolerance and violence.
These parents poking with sticks at a charcoal wasteland that was once vibrant with life and promise can count themselves lucky because, sometimes, the smouldering debris contain the charred remains of children. Last year, for instance, close to 10 girls at the Moi Girls School lost their lives in the fire that consumed their dormitory.
Imagine this. A parent drops off her child at school. The future for the child, parent, and society shines bright, because education will guarantee success for all three. But the parent only returns to the school to search through the rabble for her child’s remains!
We usually associate scenes such as these with terrorism. Terrorists are driven by the depraved idea that they can remake the world in the image of a medieval barbarism.
Terrorism evokes in us such a deep visceral antipathy because it attempts to shut down something that is very basic to being human – the inherent impulse to seek, through knowledge, freedom of the mind, body and soul.
And so, deny it as we may, what these students are doing to their schools is not any different from terrorism. They cause terror and death. They impede education, the end result being a society unable to achieve the next qualitative stage.
Because we fail to see these acts as irredeemably criminal, and refuse to acknowledge their dire implications for our future, we adopt a laissez-faire attitude towards them and their perpetrators.
Consider the measures the government came up with when one “Professor” Jacob Kaimenyi was the minister in charge of education. The so-called prof, after wracking his brain, ran to the media, almost exclaiming, like Archimedes, “Eureka, Eureka.” Mercifully , the minister, unlike the ancient Greek mathematician when he shouted those words, was fully clothed.
The cause of the trouble, Kaimenyi said, was “mock examinations” and “tuition during the holidays.” It was akin to saying that terrorists kill thousands in the streets, churches and mosques because they feel anxious about taking a driving test! Or because they feel oppressed by the prospect of taking adult literacy classes!
Now, after the resumption of the school burnings, the Education Ministry is proposing the elimination of boarding schools as a way to stop the terror.
But surely, were boarding schools to be abolished, won’t the criminals now burn the day schools, or libraries, or shops on their way home? Or even their own homes?
Let’s also not forget that boarding schools are the perfect space for mental and physical education. They also engender discipline as well as inter-communal comradeship.
Further, consider the hustle of commuting daily to and from school, and the expense of it. Consider, too, daily travel on our God and government-forsaken roads – the traffic jams , the always present danger of accidents.
If you are a parent with five children all making daily commutes, the sheer physical and mental exhaustion would cause you to also start burning schools.
The terrorism in schools is primarily caused by two factors. First, over time we have developed a culture of no consequences for criminal acts. So a politician will steal billions and get elected to parliament. Another will steal a children’s school field and be feted as a hero.
Second, violence has become the “solution” to our issues. So police will shoot unarmed demonstrators, and communities will kill their neighbours over grazing land.
We need to have a national dialogue on values killed by our brand of politics. But at the same time, we must be unfailingly merciless on what, as I have argued above, are essentially terrorist acts.
Tee Ngugi is a political and social commentator based in Nairobi.
