TUTAM & WANTAM songs sung by your elected representatives is just to divert your attention from their failures. I urge you to ask yourself, how does that help you? The Decision of TUTAM & WANTAM is solely yours. The most important thing is, demand for accountability from all those you elected from MCA to GOVERNOR. That’s is where our real problem is. It is your favourite MCA and M🐷 who are enabling all this mess you are witnessing today.
It is what it is.
Yesterday was Sabbath, but the pain in my heart did not drive me to the pulpit or to the pews of my church in Lavington. The pain in my heart drove me to Narok town to trace and find the man whose daughter perished in the Utumishi Girls fire incident in Gilgil.
Dennis Nyakeri, a tour operator and Rebecca Maina, a pastor, were in a church service at home when I arrived. I avoided eye contact with Dennis when I was ushered in to sit, because in seeing his pain, I was going to lose my ‘manliness’ and shed a tear of communal grief 😪😪😪.
In that service, even as the founders of Fountain of Life Church Bishop Mureu and his dear wife spoke, one could feel a sense of emptiness, pain, anger and confusion. It is the pain that makes one question God. It was the kind of pain that seemed for a moment to obscure the clarity of Jesus Christ.
A parent of another child at Utumishi who was a close friend of Sheryl (the departed girl), recounted their conversation with Dennis earlier. She said Dennis referred to the Bible’s Psalm 90:10 which states that “The length of our days is seventy years—or eighty, if we have the strength...". And then Dennis paused and asked, where does 15 years come in😪😪😪??? How does God allow my 15 year old to die!!😫😫😫😭😭😭😭😭
At that point, I had lost it all. I broke down. When I stood to speak, I was a mess, I must confess. I told them that I did not know anyone there. I had never met Dennis, nor his wife my whole life. I am not a parent in Utumishi. I am not from Narok and own nothing in that county. I am not a fellow tour operator of Dennis. I am not Kisii as Dennis, neither am I kikuyu as his dear wife. I do not fellowship with their
Church. I was just a man, who felt the pain of his fellow man😭😭😭😭, took himself alone, to go and share this Jesus and to take love to a wounded soul.
Friends, the pain in that home cannot be compared to any I have seen in many days. The pain endured in identifying one’s child when it’s all ashes, breaks me to the bone 😭😭😭😭😭. Jesus, please come and heal the parents whose children died in that inferno😪😪😪. Please come Lord. Please come.
For the many who reached out with information about Dennis, thank you for helping me find him. For the hundreds of you who sought how they may help and chip in, please send your support to Dennis’s number: 0794589354. Please send your generous and kind support. 😭😭😭.
Those in Narok, please visit with this family and share cheer and comfort. God bless you all. #MenForMen #HealingJourney #GodInAllThings
On Ebola
A tiny error and ebola spreads across the republic. Deaths of citizens. Travel advisories. No visas for citizens. Tourists cancel. Layoffs. Economy takes a hit. Ebola spreads to schools. Schools must close. Chaos. Months. Elections cancelled. Orphans. Widows. Ujinga! ⚖️
From yesterday, I have been holding my heart and breath for this man😪😪. I don’t know him, but my attempts to figure out his pain still fail by a whole mile. Actually, I don’t know his pain. I can imagine it, I can try and figure out its depth, I can attempt to sketch the turmoil, rage, anger, anxiety and sense of loss of this gentleman. But I am unable to truly comprehend his extent of pain😢😢😢 that this parent of Utumishi Girls Gilgil.
You see, the loss of any child is grotesquely painful. One child dead is a child too many. The loss of a child defies the norms of nature, which is that children should bury their parents, and not the vice versa.
One may struggle to comprehend the ‘madness’ of this man. I don’t know the full story. What I know is that some of these children we see and are blest to have, were products of many years of prayers. Some came to their parents after trying for many years and were the blessings that defied all village talk of barrenness. Some have been the only children who survived deaths that had claimed their older siblings at a tender age. Some may have been lone survivors of an inferno or disease that swept the entire family. Some children may be the only memory of a spousal partner who died at their prime in life. You may not know why the man had such hysteria and anxiety attack. What I know, is that the death of even a single child to a parent blest with tens of children, is deeply painful and leaves a wound that can never be healed easily😩😩😩.
This morning, my heart reaches out to him. I’m still clinging on the hope for life for his dear daughter, even when my innermost heart fears for the worst. But I am praying that this inferno was not caused by juvenile arsonists. I am praying that the allegations of some students having started the fire because they were denied celebrations of Eid-al-Adha is just some pep talk that is unfounded. I am praying that this was an accident, and not a premeditated incident. Because I am unsure how the parents of the children who perished will heal, if it were to be established that other students plotted to murder their colleagues.
Dear Lord, reach out to this man and all parents who have suffered the agony of waiting today. Please keep our children safe Jesus. Heal the parents who have to bear the unkindness of burying their children😭😭😭
Breaking: A Kenyan court has suspended the setup of an Ebola quarantine centre for Americans in Kenya pending the hearing of the application by civil society body Katiba institute.
#FocusOnAfrica@BBCAfrica
Senegal just beat Morocco in Rabat… AGAIN! 🇸🇳
Despite Morocco U17 getting a penalty in the 99th minute, Senegal U17 win on penalties and face Tanzania in the final.
Congratulations! 👏🏼
The Utumishi Girls Academy fire happened this morning in Gilgil, 28 years after the one at Bombolulu Girls High School in Mazeras, Coast Region in March 1998 where 26 students died. After the Bombolulu fire, President Moi formed a Commission of Inquiry chaired by Bishop Lawi Imathiu and it submitted its report on 31st July 1998.
The recommendations included
All exit doors in school buildings must open outwards.
Fire extinguishers must be provided and mandatory fire drills conducted for staff and students.
Dormitory capacity must not be exceeded; overcrowding must be legally enforced against.
Teachers' houses must be built so that at least the headteacher lives within the school compound.
Matrons must have minimum qualifications (Form IV and nursing/housekeeping training).
Regular, rigorous school inspections must be conducted as required by the Education Act.
Unqualified tradesmen must not be permitted to carry out electrical installations.
A national Fire Service Act should be enacted.
Students must receive coaching on emergency procedures including fire.
Schools must have adequate, functioning security fencing.
The similarities between the Utumishi incident and the Bombolulu ones are deeply disturbing.
1. Timing — a night fire in a dormitory. Bombolulu burned at night. Utumishi burned at night. Students were asleep, in darkness, in an unfamiliar emergency. This is precisely why fire drills and clear escape routes matter most — and why they are most often neglected.
2. Inward-opening or locked doors. One of the Bombolulu Commission's most urgent recommendations — Recommendation 21 — was that exit doors of school buildings must open outwards. A parent at the scene of the Utumishi fire claimed that one of the emergency exits remained locked during the fire, and that only one matron was on duty, meaning only one of the two emergency doors was opened. A parent told NTV that most of the injuries were caused by students jumping from the upper floor because one of the doors was closed. Twenty-eight years after the Commission made this recommendation in the strongest possible terms, students are still dying at doors.
3. Single matron, inadequate supervision. At Bombolulu, the Commission was scathing that only one under-qualified matron was responsible for the safety of 146 girls at night, with no teachers on site. The Utumishi parent alleged the school had only one matron assigned to the dormitory, arguing that two matrons could have opened both emergency exits simultaneously. The Bombolulu recommendation that matrons hold minimum qualifications and that headteachers live on the school compound appears not to have been implemented.
4. No fire drills, no emergency preparedness. The Bombolulu Commission found that not a single student or teacher had been coached on fire emergency procedures. The speed with which the Utumishi dormitory became fatal — with students jumping from upper floors — suggests students did not know what to do and did not have a practised evacuation route.
5. Overcrowded dormitories. Bombolulu's dormitory held nearly 50% more students than its capacity. No information on Utumishi's occupancy has yet been confirmed, but the number of casualties — 16 dead and over 100 hospitalised from a single dormitory — raises the same question.
6. The national legislative gap. Recommendation 24 of the Bombolulu report called for a national Fire Service Act. Kenya currently does not have a single, overarching national Fire and Rescue Act that governs the entire country. While there are specific legal codes and workplace rules, legislative efforts like the Fire and Rescue Services Professionals Bill and various national disaster management policies have been introduced in parliament but are still uncompleted - Twenty-eight years later.
We don’t need medical doctors who are puppets and their whole survival and existence depends on bootlicking every nonsense spewed by the corrupt regime. You cannot support this madness just because you want to be on the right side of eating.
Our basic medical needs are not catered for,drugs expiring at Kemsa,corruption and failure at SHA,now you want to bring a deadly virus which you cannot contain.
This government has normalized playing with people’s lives and the healthcare practitioners supporting this should be very ashamed and embarrassed!
Oya @DCI_Kenya
I write this with a very heavy heart.
Children are disappearing in this country, and the silence around it is becoming louder than the cries of the grieving parents left behind.
Every day, families wake up hoping their missing child will walk back through the door. Every night, mothers sleep holding photographs instead of their children.
Child protection agencies estimate that nearly 23 children are reported missing or disappear daily. Twenty-three. That is not just a number. Those are school uniforms left hanging behind doors. Those are unfinished homework books. Those are empty seats at dinner tables. Those are voices that will never again shout “Mom, I’m home.”
Yet we rarely see urgent updates, nationwide alerts, or public pressure from the authorities when these children vanish.
But when it comes to harmless social media users, critics, or ordinary citizens expressing themselves online, the response is immediate. Suddenly there is technology, speed, coordination, tracking, and arrests. Safaricom data is accessed. Software is deployed. People are traced within hours.
So Kenyans are left asking painful questions, If you can find someone over a Facebook post or a Twitter reply, why can’t you find the people stealing our children?
If surveillance systems work so efficiently against citizens speaking online, why do they fail when innocent children disappear?
Who is kidnapping our children?
A nation that cannot protect its children is a nation bleeding from the inside.
Parents are now living in fear of ordinary things: A child walking to school. A child going to buy bread. A child playing outside with friends. A child boarding a matatu alone.
We are raising children in a country where “Be home before dark” has slowly turned into “Please come back alive.”
And the most terrifying part is that Some of these children are never found. Some are found violated. Some are found dead. Some simply vanish as if they never existed.
“How many tiny coffins must be buried before this becomes a national emergency?”
“How did we become a society where parents memorize morgues before they memorize their children’s futures?”
I know speaking like this may make me a target too. Maybe this post will be monitored. Maybe I will be threatened. But silence is becoming another form of burial, and I refuse to bury my conscience while children are being buried in the ground.
The lives of our children matter more than bruised egos, online criticism, or political image management.
We are asking you to treat missing children with the same energy used to hunt down government critics online.
Because somewhere tonight, another mother is waiting at the door for a child who will never come home. And that should disturb every single one of us.