Sixteen Caskets at Gilgil Stadium: Why the Man Who Built Utumishi Girls Now Wants Boarding Schools Gone

On Friday morning, the field at Gilgil Stadium held what no school assembly should ever hold: sixteen caskets arranged in a quiet row, a National Youth Service officer standing watch beside them, and thousands of mourners who had travelled from across Nakuru County and beyond to say goodbye to the girls of Utumishi Girls' Academy. Fifteen days after a dormitory fire became one of the deadliest school disasters in Kenya's recent history, the requiem mass was meant to be a moment of collective grief. It became something more consequential when the man who founded the school rose to speak — and put the boarding school system itself on trial.

The Founder's Confession

Edward Mbugua is not a man accustomed to public contrition. A former Deputy Inspector General of Police, he built Utumishi Girls into one of the region's sought-after institutions, the kind of school parents queue for and sacrifice for. Yet on Friday, according to reporting by Kenyans.co.ke, he told mourners plainly: "I am to blame for this tragedy. I started the school." He extended the indictment to the school's board of management, which he said never raised the alarm that facilities could not safely hold the number of students enrolled, and to political leaders who he noted had never petitioned the government for more classrooms and dormitory space.

Then came the prescription that turned a funeral into a policy debate. Kenya, Mbugua argued, should phase out boarding schools altogether. "We should have day schools," he said, suggesting that existing dormitories be converted into training workshops. He went further still, questioning the single-sex school model that has defined Kenyan secondary education since the colonial era, arguing that boys and girls who grow up together at home should learn together at school.

The Night of May 28

The fire that brought Kenya to this conversation swept through a dormitory at Utumishi Girls' Academy in Gilgil on the night of Friday, May 28. Sixteen students died. The Kenya Red Cross reported that 132 people from the school were treated for injuries, making it the deadliest school fire in the country since the 2017 blaze at Moi Girls School Nairobi, and among the worst since the Kyanguli Secondary School disaster of 2001, in which 67 boys died.

Survivors interviewed by the Daily Nation described a dormitory that was locked from the inside, with keys that could not be found quickly when the flames spread. Investigators have treated the fire as suspected arson: a Naivasha court granted detectives 21 days to hold nine students while the Directorate of Criminal Investigations completes its inquiry. Local reporting has pointed to tensions inside the school in the days before the fire, including a decision to bring examination dates forward, though no final findings have been released. What is not in dispute is that a building full of sleeping girls could not be emptied fast enough.

Forty-Seven Fires Since January

If the Utumishi fire were an isolated tragedy, the founder's call might have faded with the hymns. It is not isolated. Hours before the requiem mass, the Kenya Red Cross released figures showing that 47 schools have reported fire incidents since January 2026 — 16 of them in the two weeks since Utumishi burned. The organisation says 187 people have been treated for injuries linked to school fires this year, with the Utumishi tragedy accounting for 132 of them.

The Ministry of Education's own numbers suggest the problem runs deeper than faulty wiring. Education Cabinet Secretary Julius Migos Ogamba has said the ministry has received reports of unrest from 204 senior schools this year, while day schools have remained largely unaffected. The government has now established an interministerial committee to review the wave of unrest and recommend a way forward. The pattern is one Kenya has seen before: a tragedy, a task force, a safety manual — and then, a few years later, another stadium full of caskets.

The School Fees That Cross Oceans

For Kenyans abroad, this is not a distant domestic story. The boarding school is one of the institutions that holds the diaspora family together. Parents working in the United States, the United Kingdom, the Gulf and Australia routinely school their children in Kenya, trusting boarding institutions to provide the structure that distance makes impossible. Term fees travel home through M-Pesa and money transfer operators alongside the billions of shillings in remittances that Kenyan families receive each year. Alumni associations in Texas, London and Doha run harambees for their old schools' laboratories and buses.

That trust is precisely what the past fortnight has shaken. A diaspora parent cannot attend the parents' meeting called at short notice, cannot inspect the dormitory door, cannot count the fire extinguishers. The boarding system's promise — that the school stands in for the absent parent — is the promise that failed on the night of May 28. Mbugua's proposal, whatever its fate, speaks directly to the families who pay for that promise from the farthest away.

An Old Debate, Reopened by Grief

Kenya has debated its dormitories before. After the Bombolulu Girls tragedy of 1998 and the Kyanguli fire of 2001, the government issued safety standards requiring accessible exits and unlocked doors at night. After Moi Girls in 2017, registration and infrastructure audits followed. Each reform cycle ended with boarding schools still at the centre of Kenyan secondary education: ministry data cited in Friday's reporting puts the number of boarding secondary schools at between 3,000 and 4,000, out of more than 7,000 secondary schools nationwide.

Phasing them out would be a generational undertaking. Boarding schools exist partly because of geography — students in arid counties can live hours from the nearest classroom — and partly because of belief: that residential schooling means electricity, supervised study and distance from domestic labour. Mbugua's counterargument is that the model's costs are now visible in the worst possible ledger. Whether the new interministerial committee treats his words as a mourner's grief or a founder's verdict will shape what parents — at home and abroad — decide when the next school term opens.

As the mass ended on Friday, the caskets left Gilgil Stadium for family gravesides across the country. The school's founder had already delivered the hardest eulogy of the day: not for the sixteen girls alone, but possibly for the system he helped build.