THE URGENT NEED FOR COMPETENCY IN SCHOOL GOVERNANCE

By Tim Munyi Mugo | Advocate of the High Court of Kenya 

Sixteen girls died at Utumishi Girls Academy in Gilgil on the night of 27 May 2026. Seventy-nine others were injured. The dormitory that burned housed approximately 220 students and contained 135 bunk beds. One emergency exit door was locked. Ten of the sixteen deaths occurred in the section of the building that exit door served. 

By the morning of 29 May 2026 the Cabinet Secretary for Education had dissolved the Board of Management and directed the Teachers Service Commission to initiate disciplinary proceedings against the school principal. Two teachers who had received advance warning of planned unrest from students and failed to act were also placed under investigation. 

The response was swift. Whether it was serious is a different question. 

WHAT THE BOARD DID NOT CONTAIN

A Board of Management exists to govern. Governing means asking, regularly and on the record, whether the institution is safe, compliant, and operating within the standards it is legally required to meet. The School Safety Manual and the Basic Education Regulations are not aspirational documents. They are compliance instruments. 

A board that is doing its job treats them as standing agenda items, not background reading. The facts at Utumishi suggest a board that was not doing its job. Overcrowded dormitories do not develop overnight. A locked emergency exit is not a spontaneous occurrence. 

These are conditions that accumulate over time, visible to anyone walking the institution with oversight intent. The question a governance practitioner asks is not why the CS dissolved the board. It is what the board was discussing at its last three meetings, and whether student safety appeared anywhere on those agendas. 

In the water sector we have a concept of non-revenue water, the volume of water that enters a distribution system and is lost before it reaches a paying customer. It is a technical metric but it is ultimately a governance metric, because the loss accumulates in the gap between what management reports and what the board interrogates. 

The parallel at Utumishi is direct. The safety deficit did not arrive with the fire. It arrived in every board meeting where safety compliance was not tabled, not questioned, and not recorded as a concern. The fire made the deficit visible. The board made the deficit possible. 

THE COMPETENCE THE BOARD WAS NOT CARRYING

Kenya's Boards of Management in public secondary schools are constituted under the Basic Education Act 2013. Members are drawn from parents, religious organizations, teachers, and the local community. The intention is representation. The outcome, too frequently, is a board without a single member who understands what governance actually requires of them once they sit down. 

This is not a criticism of the individuals. It is a criticism of the system that places them there without orientation, without a board charter, without induction on their fiduciary duties, and without a mechanism for holding them to account between annual general meetings. 

A parent representative is not, by virtue of parenthood, equipped to interrogate a safety compliance report, read a fire evacuation plan, or ask why the dormitory occupancy exceeds the approved capacity. These are skills. They are teachable. And they are being systematically withheld from the people we then blame when things go wrong. 

KASNEB produces Certified Secretaries every examination cycle. The market for governance professionals in Kenya is growing. The absorption of those professionals into institutional boards is not growing at the same pace. Kenya has thousands of public secondary schools, each with a Board of Management that meets periodically and makes decisions about the lives of children. 

The number of those boards that contain a single member with formal governance training is a figure no one appears to be tracking, which is itself a governance failure at the national level. The instinct after Utumishi is to dissolve the board and appoint a new one. The question the instinct does not answer is: new members, same gap? 

THE DUE PROCESS THE RESPONSE SKIPPED

The CS dissolved the Board of Management of Utumishi Girls Academy the day after the fire, on the basis of preliminary findings. The Basic Education Act does confer dissolution powers on the Cabinet Secretary. The speed at which those powers were exercised, without a formal hearing, without an opportunity for the board to respond to specific findings, and while investigations were described as ongoing, is a procedural question worth sitting with. 

Accountability and due process are not competing values. They are companion values. A system that dissolves a board before it has completed its investigations may be acting from genuine urgency. It may also be acting from the need to be seen to act. The two are not always the same thing, and the difference matters for what comes next. 

A dissolution grounded in a completed finding is a governance remedy. A dissolution grounded in a press statement is a political gesture wearing a governance costume. The teachers who received warnings and did not act face disciplinary proceedings. The principal faces action from the TSC. Investigations into Ministry of Education officials are described as ongoing. 

This accountability chain is the right instinct. But it is notable that the chain runs downward, toward the school, and has not yet been seen to run upward, toward the oversight structures that were responsible for auditing compliance at Utumishi and at the thirty-six other schools where fire incidents were recorded in Kenya in the months before. 

THE NUMBERS THAT CHANGE THE ARGUMENT

Kenya Red Cross confirmed thirty-seven school fire incidents across multiple counties since the start of 2026 alone. Utumishi was the deadliest. It was not the first, and unless something structural changes, it will not be the last. Thirty-seven incidents is not a Utumishi story. It is a Board of Management story across the entire education sector. 

It is a story about hundreds of institutions governed by boards that have never been trained, never been given tools, and never been asked to account for safety compliance by any oversight body with the authority and the will to insist. 

The reform that Utumishi demands is not faster dissolution powers. It is a mandatory governance competency framework for every Board of Management in a public institution in Kenya. A framework that specifies what a board must know, what it must ask, what it must record, and what the consequences are when it does not. 

That framework exists in the water sector, in the corporate sector, and in the capital markets. It does not yet exist, in any enforceable form, in the governance of Kenya's schools. Sixteen girls are gone. The exit door was locked. The board did not notice. 

These three facts belong in the same sentence, and they should remain there until the system produces an answer that addresses all three. 

 

 

Tim Munyi Mugo is an Advocate of the High Court of Kenya, Co-Founder of Veritas Governance Institute, and author of Governed or Captured. He writes on corporate governance, board integrity, and the law governing public institutions. 

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Disclaimer- The information provided is for general informational purposes only and should not be considered as professional advice. Please consult a qualified professional for specific guidance.