A fire at a boarding school in central Kenya has killed 17 children. The blaze tore through a dormitory at the Hillside Endarasha Academy in Nyeri county around midnight. Survivors speak of locked doors and shattered windows.
But the real story is not in Nyeri. It is in Whitehall.
The UK has poured millions into “safety capacity building” across Africa. The Department for International Development, now folded into the Foreign Office, funded dozens of projects. Fire safety was a headline priority.
So why did a 2022 audit by the British High Commission in Nairobi warn that “most school buildings in Kenya lack basic fire safety measures”? And why was that warning filed away?
A source in the FCDO tells me: “Everyone knew. But nobody wanted to be the one to say it publicly. It would have jeopardised the partnership.”
That partnership is worth £100 million a year in Kenyan education aid. British firms have won contracts to supply “fire-resistant” doors and alarms. One company, Safeguard Solutions Ltd, was awarded a £2.3 million contract in 2021. Its CEO previously donated to the Conservative Party.
Labour is circling. Shadow Foreign Secretary David Lammy has tabled an urgent question for Monday. He wants the full audit history made public.
But the Government is digging in. A Downing Street spokesperson said: “We are in close contact with Kenyan authorities. Our thoughts are with the victims. The UK’s safety standards programme is world-leading.”
World-leading? Let us examine the record.
In 2019, a fire at a school in South Africa killed 14. The UK had run a fire safety programme there too. A leaked internal report from the British High Commission in Pretoria admitted “systemic failures in the implementation of safety protocols”. It recommended a review. That review was never completed.
Then there is Ghana. In 2020, a dormitory fire killed 10 girls. The UK had funded a £500,000 safety upgrade at the school just months earlier. The upgrade did not include fire escapes.
“The problem is the obsession with outputs over outcomes,” a former DFID official says. “We count the number of doors installed. We do not check if they are unlocked at night.”
That official, who asked not to be named, says the Kenya programme was “always cited as a flagsh!p”. “They filmed a video with the High Commissioner visiting a school that had new alarms. The alarms were fake. They had no batteries.”
The video was taken down after the fire. But screenshots circulate among MPs.
Now the blame game begins. The FCDO will point to the Kenyan government. The Kenyan government will blame the school. The school will say it followed all regulations.
Except the regulations are not worth the paper they are written on. The Kenyan National Safety Standards for Schools were drawn up with UK funding in 2018. They require annual inspections. The last nationwide inspection was in 2019.
Parents are asking: where is the money going? That question will be asked in Parliament next week.
The tragedy in Nyeri is a human catastrophe. But it is also a political one. For the British government, it is a test of its commitment to soft power. For the Labour party, it is an opportunity to hit hard.
And for the families of those 17 children, it is a reminder that safety standards are only as good as the will to enforce them. That will has been lacking for years.
The FCDO will announce a new “safety review” by the end of the week. Sources suggest it will be headed by a retired senior civil servant. No one expects it to be published before the next election.
In the meantime, the bodies remain in the morgue. The questions remain unanswered. And the game of Whitehall goes on.
