Trending: Death On Campus

BY OLA NOURELDIN
MANAGING EDITOR

Over the past week, I haven’t stopped hearing stories about children who go to school in the morning but end up dead on school premises by the end of the day due to some inexcusable “lack of maintenance”.

Yeah. Dead.

See, the thing is that there are obvious points to tackle in regards to the Egyptian educational system. However, I won’t be writing about any of that for now.

I won’t write about the appalling quality of education in Egypt. I also won’t focus on the fact that in some schools in Egypt, there can be up to 90 students per classroom. I also won’t be discussing the fact that more than 30 percent of students in secondary school do not know how to read and write.

Just imagine this: Your phone rings one afternoon and you receive news that your seven-year-old son died because the school’s gate fell on him.

This is exactly what happened last week to Sultan Zaki, the father of Youssef, who was reported to have died in his school in Marsa Matrouh.

Youssef’s case, in fact, was not the first of its kind. Another incident of a student dying due to lack of school maintenance occurred earlier this week.

Student Youssef Mohamed had his throat slit by the glass of his classroom window on October 13.

Mohamed was trying to open the window next to him when it cracked and fell, cutting off the blood vessels in his neck at his school in Matariya.

The student died from excessive blood loss when two hospitals refused to treat him due to his critical condition.

I honestly just don’t understand how people in authority – starting from the Ministry of Education to the principals of these two schools – could sleep at night, knowing that their own negligence caused the death of two students.

Mind you, this won’t be the last time we hear of such travesty.

It won’t be the end, simply because all that mattered to Mahmoud Abu Al- Nasr, Egypt’s Education Minister, is that he came out on television saying that he “grieves” for the loss of the two children and “feels sad” because of the “negligence in Egyptian schools”.

But here’s the kicker – “It is not my responsibility,” he said.

“Egypt needs EGP 20 billion for school maintenance,” he said.

“We have 50,000 schools in Egypt, 75 percent of them are in need of high maintenance,” he said.

So, if it isn’t the responsibility of the Minister of Education to ensure the safety of students in schools, whose responsibility is it?

Egypt has a lot of problems, every single one of us knows that. However, I urge political pundits not to accept high ranking positions, if they will not be able to come up with a plan and system to solve these problems.

However, I really applaud Al-Nasr for having certain numbers and detailed statistics on what is missing in schools and what needs to be worked on.

But, hello? Are you going to do anything with these numbers? Or no, maybe we can wait some more, till a couple more students die in their own school and then you can start brainstorming how you can fix this.

A school that does not guarantee the lives of its students is a school that should be evacuated immediately.

Holding those in power accountable is a prerequisite for achieving future solutions. So I’m urging President Abdel Fattah Al-Sissi to launch a transparent investigation to ensure that these two awful incidents are the last.