Kenya: Arson caused fire that killed nine schoolgirls

Education minister confirms reports of attacks around the country, including in Mombasa and Kisumu besides Nairobi.

Kenya's education minister says arson was to blame for a fire that killed nine pupils at a girls' boarding school in Nairobi over the weekend and that there had been similar attacks on other schools around the country.

Fred Matiangi said on Monday that some arson attacks were related to fights over staff appointments in schools, where senior positions can bring financial rewards.

"It was not an accident, it was arson," Matiangi said of the blaze on Saturday at Moi Girls School in the capital in which nine girls were killed and 10 injured.

Matiangi said there had been a spate of arson attacks on schools around the country, including in the coastal city of Mombasa and the western city of Kisumu. He did not give the total number of attacks.

"Some of the fires we have faced before in the sector are related to that kind of thing, politicisation of school headship, politicisation of responsibility in the education sector. It is not right," he said.

"We cannot resolve a conflict on the headship of the school by burning a school."

More than 120 schools around the country were set on fire last year, according to research by a Canadian professor. Almost none of the cases have been successfully prosecuted.

Kenya is East Africa's largest economy but unemployment is high and corruption is rife, making life difficult for many ordinary people.

Control of a school can mean not just a government salary but an opportunity to extort extra money from students and parents in fees or other charges.

Many of the fires are set by students in protest at harsh discipline, poor teaching and corruption, according to Canadian Elizabeth Cooper, assistant professor of International Studies at Simon Fraser University.

"Boarding school life is often experienced by students as excessively rigid and authoritarian," she wrote in an article about the trend last year.

Students she interviewed complained about poor food, scarce teaching materials, harsh teachers and management that ignored their concerns. Many compared their schools to prison.

"The destruction of their dorms means that they will be sent home and given some respite from their intensive boarding school lifestyles," Cooper wrote. "We can likely expect more fires next year."

Cited Source:

Jazeera, Al. “Kenya: Arson Caused Fire That Killed Nine Schoolgirls.” Kenya News | Al Jazeera, Al Jazeera, 4 Sept. 2017, www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/09/kenya-arson-caused-fire-killed-schoolgirls-170904103330148.html.

Response:

This article shows the violence and unrest among the Kenyan people due to the unstable state of the schools around the country. I feel that all of this violence could be avoided if the government officials or even the president would ensure the safety of the people and control the armed forces with a stronger will. It is devastating to see that there are young girls dying due to arson attacks at schools just because of the higher ups wanting to have better positions that are well off financially. This article was clearly intended for the government and the schools so that they would be able to do something about this issue that continues to arise due to the head position of schools. 

However, I have noticed that there is a slight bias in this article in that the writer suggested that the control of the school may mean that there is a problem with taking more money from families. This may not be true for some of the schools and I feel that the writer could have researched more deeply into this.

Also, there is a possibility that the publisher and the reader may also have a bias point of view as the publish/read this article. The publisher could be intending to make the school headmasters look bad and therefore cause more tension between the teachers and the parents of the students. The readers, on the other hand, could look at this situation and think that all the Kenyan schools are terrible and have horrible teachers. However, it is important to think about all the different perspectives and to realize that not everything on this article may be true.

By: Grace Yoon