The Most Traumatic Week for Kenyan Children

Petrol fire!...Everyone goes, goes and goes crazy. They refuse to come back instead they choose to stay in Crazy-land and enjoy what that section of the world offers.

That’s the best description one easily finds for what happened last Monday when petrol fire consumed human lives at Sinai in Mukuru slums.

First this crazy episode began with a leakage of a valuable liquid into a sprawling hamlet and the leaker’s owner somehow chose not to act in time to stop the leaking. Second, tantalised by the precious liquid, residents suffering from several inadequacies, including knowledge of the flammability of the fluid, but ready to get themselves a worthy meal out of an irregular freebie, rushed out to scoop the liquid. By the way, who would not do that? Especially when the daily supply of food is unpredictable owing to lack of enough money to buy inflated foodstuffs. Many would rather risk quick death than die a slow hunger-caused death.

Third, out of nowhere fire being a great friend to petrol quickly re-establishes its camaraderie with the latter albeit with disastrous effects that could only be equated to the biblical Sodom and Gomorrah.

Fourth, chaos erupt, people burn to death, others survive but with various degrees of lethal burns, some cry, others overawed by the intensity of the flames. Fifth, intrusive media in fierce competition and seeking to outdo their nearest and furthest rivals run aimlessly to capture and transmit live pictures of survivors burning, ‘enjoy’ a bit by resting their cameras on these excruciatingly pained individuals, then knowingly or ignorantly, whichever comes first, decide to feed its viewers, without prior warning, with dead bodies, dripping blood, sobbing children...sixth is the unending blame game-unnecessary!

So why did the local TV stations transmit live pictures of the injured with blood streaming from their bodies? Or scalded sections of their good bodies? Was it moral? At a time when most Kenyans were having lunch? And probably at a time when children were watching TV?

The jury should be out on this. However, moral or immoral, legal or illegal, correct or incorrect,   innocent children should never be feed blood, scalded or charred bodies on TV or similar pictures on newspapers. If it’s nightmarish for adults who at least expect such things to happen in case of fire, how will an ignorant 10-year-old who knows nothing about such things feel at night after seeing gory clips and pictures deliberately fed by scoop-addicted media outlets? It must be terrorising as in more than nightmarish.

Unfortunately, that’s what most children saw on the screens and read on their dailies this week. They must be cursing the creator of this world for subjecting them to such devilish things.

Moral Lesson: Most media outlets performed badly in the whole episode. If they sought to tell Kenyans of the fire’s intensity they should have done it with dignity instead of scaring the hell out of most including children.