Cutting corners and shame.

If there's a corner, you can trust that a Kenyan in a position of power or authority will find a way to cut it. If cutting corners were an Olympic sport, the medal haul would be in the same league as David Rudisha's rather impressive haul. But it isn't. It is the millstone round our necks. It is the reason why a student is dead and a hundred and fifty one have been injured. It is the reason why that idiot who ordered us not to "die like cockroaches" still keeps his job.

It is almost tend days since one hundred and forty seven other students were massacred in their dormitories and scores injured. In that period not all of the remains of the deceased have been identified while some have been misidentified leading to the spectacle of the families of the deceased fighting over the custody of remains they believe are of their loved ones. Our outrage seems not to have pricked the consciences of the president's propagandists - a new hashtag goes something like this : #2YearsOfSuccess, while parts of the North Rift see inviting the Commander-in-Chief to award trophies to golfers as a priority.

Back to the corner-cutting. Unless I have been blinded and deafened, the national Executive's installations, such as Harambee House, Sheria House, Commission House, KICC, Harambee House Annexe, Vigilance House, Herufi House and Jogoo House haven't had emergency drills in the past five years. I am not aware of the safety officers at Sheria House. (They seem to have found a few shillings to build security cages and entry pavilions that see very little use though.) If you are casually walking down Parliament Road take a gander at Sheria House and try to look for the emergency exits. When you find one call the newspapers. You will have discovered the reincarnated dodo and mighty moa.

It costs some money - not much - and time to train safety officers and to run emergency drills. What do you want to bet that the aforementioned buildings' supervisors have found alternative uses for the funds allocated for the safety of their buildings and their users? If this is how the core institutions of the national Executive view public safety, it is almost impossible for them to enforce safety measures in the wide edifice that is the public sector. It is how university students are left to fend for themselves when electricity transformers "explode" and send them into a panic. It is how stupidly insensitive mandarins blame us for "dying like cockroaches."

Sunny Bindra is right. It is not rage that should come first. Nor disgust. It is shame. We should be utterly mortified that this is what we expect of ourselves, of others, of the State and of its institutions: death and destruction on a colossal scale. Every day that I climb up the eight flights to my office because we seem to have "reallocated" the funds for the repair of lifts in my public building, I should do so with shame. Shame that I am a coward, unwilling to point out that that is not what a public building should be like, shame that I do not know what the evacuation plan of my public building looks like, shame that I do not know to where I shall evacuate, shame that I do not know who my designated safety officer is, shame that deep down I am afraid of my boss and will thus say nothing. Shame is the only response, the only appropriate reaction.

When I next travel overseas - if I travel overseas again - I will not hold my head high because David Rudisha and his teammates will keep cleaning up in the medal sweepstakes. I will not hold my head high because our tea is the envy of the world. I will not hold my head high because literacy, for the first time, is over 75%. I will hang it low in shame because children keep dying while idiots keep their jobs for doing nothing to even mitigate emergencies. I will hang it low because even the national Executive is okay with that situation. I will hang it low in shame. Deep and abiding shame.