Before Kenya asks who lit the fire at Utumishi Girls Academy, it should ask what had already been burning within the school system. The criminal question matters, and the students accused of involvement deserve due process. But even if the courts identify the culprits, that will not settle the deeper issue. What kind of school environment allows children to allegedly turn fire into a language of grievance, revenge, or protest?
That question takes us beyond one dormitory, one school board, or one night in Gilgil. It forces us to examine discipline, parenting, school safety, adolescent pressures, weak supervision, and the moral vocabulary we have given children over the last generation. Somewhere along the way, Kenya became very fluent in the language of children’s rights, but far less confident in the language of responsibility, restraint, and lawful authority.
The Problem of Rights without Responsibility
That is the imbalance I call rights inflation. By rights inflation I do not mean that rights themselves are false or unnecessary. I mean the careless expansion of rights language in a way that weakens duty, restraint, consequence, and the authority needed to protect everybody’s rights. It occurs when every claim is framed as a right, while the duties, limits, restraints, and consequences that make rights possible receive far less attention.
A child learns that he or she has rights against abuse, unfair treatment, and arbitrary authority. But the same child may not learn with equal force that every right exists within a moral order that includes duty to others, respect for life, acceptance of consequences, and self-control.
The problem, therefore, is not that children have rights. They do, and they must. The problem is that rights have often been taught more loudly than responsibility, leaving many adults afraid to exercise lawful authority even when danger is visible. Utumishi did not happen because children have rights. That would be a simplistic conclusion. It happened within a wider crisis in which authority has weakened, moral formation has been outsourced, boarding schools are overstretched, safety systems are neglected, and responsibility is no longer taught with the seriousness it deserves. Rights inflation does not explain everything, but it helps explain why schools increasingly struggle to correct misconduct before it escalates into disaster.
The Noble History and the Kenyan Misstep
To understand this properly, we must step back into history.
The language of rights has a long and noble history. It emerged partly as a defense against tyranny, arbitrary power, and abuse. The Magna Carta (1215), the English Bill of Rights (1689), the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789), and the American Bill of Rights (1791) all expressed the idea that rulers should not treat human beings as property or subjects without protection. After the horrors of World War II, the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights gave this idea global moral force by affirming human dignity, life, liberty, security, and education.
Understanding that history is important because rights emerged as a shield against abuse by those who wielded power. They protected people from kings, colonial administrators, dictators, abusive police officers, cruel teachers, and violent parents. No serious person should want to return to a world where children are beaten, humiliated, or silenced in the name of discipline. The ban on corporal punishment in schools was therefore not a mistake in principle.
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The mistake lay in how different cultures adopted human rights norms and what followed. In Kenya, for instance, we removed an abusive tool without building a strong alternative system of authority.
Philosophical Roots of the Imbalance
A brief detour into political philosophy helps illuminate how this imbalance emerged. Jean-Jacques Rousseau gave the modern world a seductive view of human nature. Human beings, in his imagination, are born naturally good and are corrupted by society. If oppressive structures are removed, goodness can flourish. Much modern rights language carries this optimism.
By contrast, Thomas Hobbes offered a far more skeptical account of human behaviour. Without strong authority, he argued, human beings descend into competition, fear, and violence. Perhaps the most practical position comes from John Locke, who sought to reconcile liberty with order. He defended natural rights to life, liberty, and property, but he also placed those rights within reason, law, and social obligation.
Kenya’s problem is that our practice has drifted closer to Rousseau’s optimism than Locke’s realism. We speak forcefully about rights but weakly about moral formation. We instituted rights to protect children from cruelty, which is good, but we have not built strong habits of responsibility, restraint, and accountability. The result is a confused school culture in which teachers fear accusations, parents defend children blindly, administrators protect the school’s image, and students quickly learn where the gaps are.
A Pattern of School Tragedies
This does not mean children are monsters. It means children are human beings in formation. They require love, boundaries, correction, discipline, example, and consequences.
Kenya’s school unrest must be viewed through this wider lens. We have seen fires, strikes, vandalism, and violence recur across decades. St. Kizito (1991), Kyanguli (2001), Hillside Endarasha Academy (2024), and now Utumishi form a painful history of institutions failing before tragedy strikes. Each case has its own facts, but across many of them we see the same ingredients: grievance, weak supervision, poor safety systems, peer pressure, administrative failure, and children who no longer see destruction as morally unthinkable.
At Utumishi, if police accounts are confirmed, students did not merely break windows or refuse meals. They allegedly used fire in a dormitory where other children were sleeping. That crosses from protest into moral collapse.
Who Must Take Responsibility?
Parents must look in the mirror and reflect on their parenting approach. Too many homes have surrendered moral formation to schools, domestic workers, churches, screens, and peer culture. Teachers must reacquaint themselves with their vocation. Government bears perhaps the heaviest institutional burden. Kenya has safety guidelines, yet schools remain overcrowded, dormitories have inadequate exits, counselling services are limited, and inspections often become paperwork exercises.
The remedy is not a return to brutality. Kenya needs lawful authority that is firm, accountable, and humane. Schools need enforceable discipline systems, serious counselling services, trained dormitory staff, proper fire drills, and real consequences for misconduct. Parents must discipline their children and stop treating every correction as an attack. Government must move beyond circulars that die in filing cabinets.
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Most importantly, education must teach rights and responsibility together. Children should know their rights, but they must also learn that rights are sustained by duties. The right to protest does not include the right to endanger the lives and safety of others.
Utumishi is not only an arson case; it is a warning about what happens when rights are detached from responsibility, authority is weakened without replacement, and adults retreat from the difficult work of forming children.
Kenya should mourn the victims, prosecute the guilty fairly, and urgently improve school safety. But unless we restore the moral architecture that teaches children freedom with restraint, grievance with responsibility, and rights with duty, we will continue treating fires as isolated tragedies when they are really signals from a society that has lost its balance. The fire at Utumishi did not begin with a match; it began with years of adults looking away.
This article was written by George Nyongesa, a lecturer of philosophy and logic at the University of Nairobi and Chuka University.
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