What is wrong with you people?

Let me aim a few sharp kicks at the shins of parents.

What is wrong with you people? Do you love and care for your children? Do you care for their welfare? Do you maintain an iron grip on their fates? Do you know what is going on in the lives of your children? Do you know what dangers your children face every day?

What is wrong with you people?!

StephJoy is now a byword for unacceptable risk. It is connected to two boarding secondary schools at which the safety of the inmates - for that is what the boarders are -  is far from assured. It is not the only one. There are thousands of boarding schools that are little more than deathtraps. That parents willingly send their children to these death camps defies logic.

From the little that we have seen in the news media, StephJoy's sleeping arrangements dealt with the inmates like sardines: packing them in and stacking them three-high. The rooms were poorly ventilated and did not have easy access to escape routes when tragedy struck, as it inevitably did. From the harrowing testimony of the survivors, StephJoy did not have a health and safety policy, it did not have a health and safety manual, it did not have health and safety equipment, and the inmates were neither trained nor drilled in health and safety operations.

Now there are three sets of parents and the other members of their families reeling after their tragic losses. They must wonder whether they are to blame for the hell to which they cast their children into. How could they not have seen the obvious signs of a facility designed to gouge them for all they were worth without assuring them that their children would be safe? Were they blinded by the promise of As and Bs at the Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education? Why didn't they ask StephJoy's proprietors about the school's emergency preparedness?

We are going to lay the blame for the horrific deaths at the feet of the greedy StephJoy proprietors, the negligent teaching and non-teaching staff and the lackadaisical Ministry of Education, Science and Technology. The more religiously minded among us will blame the devil. The social-science true believers will blame alcohol, drugs and hormones. The mean-spirited, including me, will lay the blame at the feet of the parents.

Of course boarding schools cannot provide the comforts of home at the price that 99% of parents are willing to pay. But the price they were charged for the privilege of educating their children should have been warning enough. A casual walk around the school's facilities should have raised their hackles. The fact that the sister school had nipped an arson plot in the bud should have served as fair warning, especially after the schoolgirls involved in the plot confessed that some of the boys from the boys' school were involved. Clue after clue were ignored by the parents. And three boys were murdered by their schoolmates.

What is wrong with you people?