So eight Kenyan students are under arrest for setting their own school ablaze. The UK, ever the dutiful imperial relic, offers forensic expertise to help investigate. How quaint. How utterly predictable. We rush to solve problems we barely understand, armed with our forensic kits and our moral superiority, as if a few DNA swabs can mend a society rotting from within.
Let us not mince words. What happened in Kenya is not a mere crime spree. It is a symptom of a deeper sickness, a cultural and institutional decay that mirrors the decline of the late Roman Empire or the moral vacuum of the Victorian slums. These children, barely into their teens, have become agents of destruction. They burn their own dormitories, their own futures, in a pathetic act of rebellion. Why? Because they have been raised in a system that values nothing. No discipline. No reverence for authority. No sense of consequence. The schools, once bastions of order and enlightenment, have become holding cells for the angry and the aimless.
And what does Britain do? We send forensic experts. As if the problem is a lack of sophisticated investigation techniques. Let me be clear: the problem is not that the Kenyan police lack the tools to catch arsonists. The problem is that the arsonists exist at all. The problem is that a generation has been taught that destruction is a valid form of protest, that burning a building is preferable to reading a book. This is what happens when you import the worst of Western progressivism without the accompanying framework of responsibility. You get chaos.
The Victorians understood this. They built schools not merely to teach arithmetic but to forge character. Drill. Discipline. Duty. These were the pillars of Empire. Today we mock such concepts as colonial relics, yet we scramble to offer forensics when the empire of order collapses. The irony is lost on our bureaucrats.
Consider the historical parallels. Rome did not fall because barbarians breached its gates. Rome fell because its citizens lost the will to defend its values. They became soft, decadent, reliant on free grain and spectacle. The schools in Kenya are our bread and circuses: places of emptiness where the young are fed ideology instead of virtue. And when the circus burns down, we send forensic experts.
What Kenya needs is not more British expertise. It needs a restoration of discipline. It needs parents who raise children to fear the rod and respect the law. It needs teachers who are not afraid to punish. It needs a society that says: burning a school is not a cry for help. It is a crime. And it must be met not with forensic analysis but with harsh justice.
The UK’s offer of forensic help is a pleasant gesture, but it is also an evasion. It allows us to feel useful without addressing the real issue: the moral bankruptcy of modern education, both here and abroad. Until we confront that, we will keep sending forensic teams to stamp out fires while the arsonists breed new ones.
So by all means, send your experts. They will find fingerprints and DNA. They will write reports. But the fire will come again, because the soul of the institution has already turned to ash.
