Shauritanga: 20 years after, are schools safe?

School is supposed to be a safe place, where young people go to acquire the necessary skills to make them useful citizens.

When a child leaves home it is every parent’s expectation that the child is in safe hands and therefore he will return home safely. Unfortunately, sometimes there is no such a guarantee that your child will return home just as he left enriched with knowledge.

On some occasions there are some who just don’t make it whereas others come home having to contend with lifetime scars on their bodies.

To parents and guardians, this is nothing but an horror that not even time can heal!

These come in different forms ranging from fires to collapsing structures that leave school children trapped.

What was once a fountain of knowledge filled with laughter and joy all of a sudden turns into a booby trap.

On June 18, 1994, a somber mood engulfed the country when more than 40 students at Shauritanga Secondary School in Kilimanjaro lost their lives in a midnight inferno that gutted one of their dormitories.

The grisly scenes of the dormitory with most of the teenage girls’ bodies lying close to the door are still very disturbing to date.

Twenty years after this incident, a comprehensive dossier on the hungry fires that remain as the worst in the country’s history is yet to be released, even as disturbing as it was. Several questions remain unanswered.

The Shauritanga incident has not been an isolated one, another terrible fire that is believed to have started when a student at Idodi Secondary School, Iringa, tried to study using candle light killed 12 .

The Idodi incident razed the whole dormitory to the ground leaving nothing worth looking at, but losses in both human and material resource of a school that had around 461 students.

“The fire burnt one dormitory completely and 12 students were killed. Another 20 have been injured,” said the then Iringa Regional Police Commander, Evarist Mangala.

“We’re still investigating (the cause), but it looks like it’s from a candle lit by a student who was trying to study at night,” he continued.

What looked like some isolated two incidents of sheer bad luck would soon become a major concern as more schools fell victims of inexplicable fires.

In mid 2003 St Mary’s International Academy in Tabata Dar es Salaam, suffered two mysterious fires that gutted the boys dormitory and a classroom block.

Unlike their counterparts, on that evening the pupils were in the dining hall for their supper.

“I had never seen such a fire before, it was worse than any of the bush fires I had ever seen. Even with the joint operation after the Fire Department and Knight Support arrived the fire was still defiant,” says a former teacher.

In August, fire destroyed property on the second floor of Mtambani Mosque in Kinondoni, Dar es Salaam, a section owned by the Oysterbay-based Mivumoni Islamic Secondary School.

According to Kinondoni Police boss, Camilius Wambura, though no death resulted from the blaze, office rooms, classrooms, furniture and other properties were destroyed.

Filbert Bayi Primary School in October went up in smoke after a fire destroyed part of the school and the boarding house occasioning losses which are estimated at Sh700 million.

In the three incidences no one was hurt and no lives were lost but even then they serve as some food for thought.

These frequent fires are raising questions; on top of the list is how safe are our schools, especially the boarding ones, does any guideline exist on school safety?

Mr Benjamin N.M. Nkonya, the secretary general of Tanzania Association of Managers and Owners of Non-government Schools and Colleges (TAMONGSCO), attributes the problem of school infernos to lack of school safety regulations that govern the safety of students while at school.

“Though the education act (1) talks about school safety, there is no single regulation that shows how this should be executed,” says Mr Nkonya

According to him, what is being used alternatively is the fire and rescue regulations that he claims were not made specifically for schools.

Mr Nkonya alleges that the regulation does not serve the purpose; in fact it is a leeway for inspectors to mint money.

“We have been on the receiving end of harassments from inspectors from the ministry…having inspectors without official safety regulations who are not trained on school safety procedures puts a lot at stake,” says Mr Nkonya.

Officials from the Occupational Health and Safety Authority (OSHA) are also frequent visitors at schools, however, despite these visits, Mr Nkonya claims, the motive is not about inspection.

“On every visit these officials take Sh1 million,” he says.

According to Mr Nkonya, all complaints lobbied by his office have landed on deaf ears as nothing has been done to rescue them from these officials who seem to be very busy.

According to the secretary general, a sector that caters for 10million students, calls for a strong regulatory system.

“We need to have the Tanzania Education and Training Regulatory Authority,” he says.

However, as Nkonya and co register their complaints, a quick look at the Ministry of Education and Vocational Training website establishes that the ministry had actually issued a circular on curbing school fires in 2011.

The circular, dated number four of 2011 was signed by assistant education commissioner Ms Marystella Maufi Wassena.

It directs that every school, primary, secondary or even colleges should install smoke detectors that are working which are bound to be inspected regularly.

The circular also directs schools to have emergency exists in dormitories, labs, canteens and classrooms which can also be opened from the outside in an event of fire.

It further prohibits the usage of candles, crude oil lamps inside classrooms and dormitories.

“Students shouldn’t iron clothes inside their dormitories, a special room should be allocated for this purpose,” reads part of the circular.

“Students should be furnished with proper ways of fire fighting without putting their lives at risk.”

Parents taking their children to school must be assured of the safety of their children while at school, meaning that education inspectors ought to inspect all school dormitories and compounds to ensure that they are built in a way that allow students to escape in an orderly manner.

However, even as detailed as this directive might be, what is on the ground is the exact opposite, a negligible percentage of schools have complied with this circular.

A visit to most schools in Dar es Salaam shows that apart from some of the expired fire extinguishers that hang around corners of buildings nothing much is functional.

Most of the classroom windows are burglar proof and there is no emergence exits as required by the law.

Yet according to the school heads and authorities, inspectors come sometimes three times a year.

Apart from a few international schools, those with clearly marked ‘Fire Assembly’ points are quite few.

These structures leave a lot of questions unanswered especially on the inspectorate department as to whether our schools are safe enough.

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