How many more children must die until we become Japan?

The school argued that the decision to send the children home had been sound and that the school could not have known that a big tsunami would follow. The judge stated the staff failed in their duty to protect the children in their care by not collecting sufficient information to ensure the safe evacuation of the children.

Japanese media indicated the decision was the first in Japan that compensated tsunami victims and was expected to affect other similar cases. They did not have to wait long. In 2016, another court ordered a city to pay $13.4 million in damages to families of 23 schoolchildren who died in the March 2011 tsunami, faulting teachers for failing to evacuate them to safe ground even as loudspeakers urged residents to flee, reported The Guardian newspaper.

According to geologists, Japan has the highest number of earthquakes globally owing to its geographical location along the ‘Pacific Ring of Fire’. The Washington Post notes, Japan accounts for 18 per cent of the world’s earthquakes. Every year, at least 1,500 earthquakes are reported in Japan!

Dear reader, with this in mind, does it mean that Japan expects its teachers to also be tsunami and earthquake experts? To our Ugandan palate, which has grown accustomed to the soft life of mediocrity and impunity, faulting teachers and city authorities for children’s deaths in a natural disaster in a country most prone to earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanoes seems like a tad much kajanja!

It is said, “A nation’s greatness is measured by how it treats its weakest members.” Japan has carved out a reputation as being the gold standard when it comes to quality of life because such is the standard of responsibility and, therefore, value attached to a single Japanese life, especially for its most vulnerable – children.

Of the Ugandan news stories that dominated July, the tragic death of a student at a prominent school, Seeta High School, lingers. A harrowing nightmare in living colour is the death of a child, of parents burying their offspring.

Parents doing right by their children, sending them to school, only to receive news that is every parent’s worst nightmare: a corpse, their vibrant child dead. Closure for the family is far off when the circumstances of the death are shrouded in mystery and unresponsiveness from the duty bearers.

News reports indicate that on Sunday, August 3, 17-year-old Kevin Nsamba drowned when a group of students fresh from a football game descended upon the school swimming pool. Nsamba is said to have jumped into the deep end of the pool. At the time, a lifeguard was supervising a swimming session.

Nsamba’s colleagues reportedly only noticed his absence later in the evening when they settled down to watch a movie, triggering a futile search for him. Daily Monitor recounts next morning on August 4, the search for Nsamba, led by the school principal, resumed.

Alas!

The search yielded Nsamba’s floating body in the swimming pool. His death raises several disturbing questions about awareness of child safeguarding in schools. This is not even an earthquake, a natural disaster where we can throw our hands up in the air fatalistically.

Experts refer to drowning as the ‘silent killer’, warning that contrary to depictions of drowning in popular media, drowning happens quickly and silently. The American National Drowning Prevention Alliance states, “Drowning does not look like drowning! Drowning is fast, silent, and can happen in as little as 30 seconds. No Splashing. No Waving. No Yelling.”

Findings from Makerere University School of Public Health’s Trauma and Injury Control Centre reveal that drowning has quietly emerged as one of the top three causes of death in the past three years.

In an interview with the Daily Monitor, the executive director of the Trauma and Injury Control Centre stated that drowning is a silent public health crisis in Uganda, with at least eight people drowning daily in the country. Ironically, Nsamba’s death came days after Uganda commemorated the global World Drowning Prevention day on July 25, during which the government launched a National Drowning Prevention Strategic Plan.

The plan seeks to reduce drowning fatalities and improve water safety countrywide. At the press conference, the assistant commissioner for Maritime Monitoring in the ministry of Works and Transport, Dr Charles Luzigye, counselled Kampala residents, “While the government is working to reduce flooding in the city, residents need to learn how to swim. It is a critical life-saving skill – the last resort when all else fails…”

(Again. In Japan, parents sue schools/ city authorities for schoolchildren killed in tsunamis, but here you are living on vibes in a pothole-infested flood-prone city, and you know not how to swim when the rains come!)

Dear reader, in short, we must tread very carefully around waterbodies, whether manmade or natural. Nsamba’s death raises a myriad of questions about child safety protocols in schools when one considers the various points at which warning bells should have gone off. Nsamba’s death is not the first and, unfortunately, not the last.

Yet his untimely demise should not be in vain. As a country, our record on safety is horrendously unsafe – the rate of road accident deaths alone paints a gory and alarming picture. We whizz about like boda bodas whose recklessness has us hallucinating that we have spare lives in our neglected burial grounds in the villages.

Reports of school fires, physical and sexual violence against children, and child neglect are rampant – several children have died in the noble course of obtaining education. This is a gross abdication of duty on the part of duty bearers that we must interrogate.

On February 25, parliament speaker, Anita Among, tasked the ministry of Education and Sports to investigate the deaths of learners in schools. This came hot on the heels of the drowning of a student of Victorious School in Kampala, the hacking to death of a Primary One child at Jozan nursery and primary school in Soroti, and the alleged suicide of 16-year-old Elishammah Ssesazi, also a student of Seeta High School.

Stressing the responsibility schools have for the children entrusted to them by parents, Among emphasised, “You cannot have a child who has never gone to a swimming pool just pushed there, and he drowns. It is a very bad thing. We have a child who was slaughtered in Soroti and dumped in a pit latrine. After removing that child, they found four other skulls in that pit latrine…”

Skulls in a school pit latrine?? Are we even alive at this point? How have we made it this far? Poignantly, the minister of State for Higher Education, John Chrysostom Muyingo, who is also the proprietor of Seeta High School, admitted that the ministry of Education needs to drastically improve on school inspections.

The case of Seeta High School is particularly disquieting as this is the second student death this year. Yet this is not about Seeta High School or the minister behind it. Nor is it about simply finding another school, as some flippantly argue on social media.

This is about responsibility – the standard of responsibility that duty bearers attach to one Ugandan life. Children die, and schools and their parent ministry continue ambling along, admitting that yes, children have been failed, yes, more should be done to protect children, yet not a single head from the ministry of Education and Sports is on the chopping block over the deaths of children in school.

The preventable death of one child should be one death too much. I fear we have lived too long under the yoke of mediocrity and impunity, dumbing down the value of Ugandans to Ugandans. We have become too comfortable living like beggars, squatting in the Pearl of Africa.

How many more children will die in preventable deaths until we decide our lives are worth fighting for?