National Assembly Majority Leader Kimani Ichung’wah, on Tuesday, June 2, stated that students who opt to burn schools to air their frustration picked the habit from protesters.
Speaking in Parliament, Ichung’wah explained that school fires are frequent in Term Two of the academic calendar, and are often caused by mental fatigue among students.
He opined that students resort to burning schools because they have not been exposed to other ways to air their frustrations.
“Many of the cases are because the students are probably fatigued and want to go home. If you want to go home, you do not need to burn down anything, not a dormitory, classroom or school bus.
“We must lead by example as parents, such that if we want to protest against anything as a country, let us not have fires everywhere because these children could be copying from us or from the country,” Ichung’wah stated.
The Kikuyu MP maintained that his remarks were not to condemn anybody but to plead with the nation to learn from its past mistakes.
He added that resolving the spiking cases of unrest in schools would not be solved by installing fire prevention and extinguishing technologies in schools.
“I don’t know whether it will be enough to put up fire detectors or fire suppression systems in all these schools, but can we afford it? It calls for a deeper conversation. It is not enough to just point fingers at each other,” the lawmaker stated.
He explained that the conversations should be done by parents individually in their homes and collectively in schools, churches, and political platforms.
Ichung’wah called out individuals who claimed that MPs were enjoying themselves at the National Prayer Breakfast as children died in the Utumishi Girls Academy fire.
He questioned why certain leaders would use such an incident to gain political mileage by attacking the National Assembly.
The lawmaker warned that the school fires are a sign of a bigger problem in future. He expressed his condolences to the families of the 16 girls who passed on in the fire.
