Four Girls Dead in Kampala After Eating Oranges at School

Four girls, aged nine to eleven, went to school on Tuesday and did not come home alive. Three died in their own houses. The fourth died in a hospital bed while doctors fought to save her. Their crime was eating oranges that a classmate shared with them at Ta'aliim Primary School and Quran Memorisation Centre in Kampala. Children who went to learn their letters and recite their verses came back in coffins.

Who checked that fruit? Who inspected the kitchen, the water, the hands that peeled it? Who is accountable when a place of learning becomes a crime scene? Right now, the only answer the state has offered is an arrest. The head teacher has been detained to assist investigators, the centre has been cordoned off with tape, and the police have promised more information "in due course." We have heard that phrase before, and so have the families who are now burying their daughters.

The facts so far are brutal in their simplicity. Eight pupils ate the oranges. Five began vomiting. Four of them died. The fifth is still in hospital, fighting for her life. Post-mortem examinations are underway to establish the cause, and we will wait for those results, because truth matters more than speculation. But waiting for the truth does not mean waiting in silence. Police say detectives will travel to the village where the oranges were grown. Think about what that means. The chain of food that ended in four child deaths stretches beyond the school gate, through a farm, a market, and a supply route that no inspector was apparently watching. Somewhere along that chain, a system failed to protect children who had no way to protect themselves.

Ugandan parents are not waiting politely. In videos circulating across the country, grieving mothers and fathers describe their children's final hours, and some accuse the school of failing to give them clear and timely information. Imagine being a parent who receives a phone call that your child is sick, then another that she is dead, with no one able to tell you what she ate or why. That confusion is its own cruelty. A school that cannot communicate during a child's medical emergency has already failed the family, whatever the lab eventually finds.

This is also not the first time. Uganda's health authorities and local media have documented earlier incidents involving contaminated food and harmful exposure in schools, where pupils were hospitalised with stomach pain, vomiting and breathing difficulties. Each time, the same demands are made: strengthen monitoring of school feeding schemes, improve hygiene standards, make learning environments safer. Each time, the demands are noted, promised, and quietly filed away. A single tragedy is a scandal. A pattern of tragedies is a government choosing not to act.

We need to be honest about priorities. Yoweri Museveni has held power since 1986, nearly four decades in which the Ugandan state has built an impressive capacity for security operations, political mobilisation and rapid deployment when its leaders feel threatened. A government that can move that quickly against its critics should be able to move just as fast to inspect a school kitchen. The question is not whether Uganda has the capacity. The question is whether it considers the stomachs of nine-year-old girls worth the same urgency as its own political survival.

The good news is that the path forward is not mysterious, and Africa has already proven it works. Ghana's School Feeding Programme, launched in 2005, shows that a government can feed children at national scale when it builds registration systems, supply chains and oversight. Botswana has earned its reputation for stability through disciplined, rule-based institutions that do not bend when a crisis hits. Mauritius built one of the continent's most prosperous economies by insisting on transparent administration and accountable public services. None of these countries is perfect. All of them understood that good governance is not a luxury for when the budget allows. It is the minimum a state owes its citizens.

So here is what Uganda must do, and do now. Every school that serves food, including the fruit that children share in the playground, must be inspected, and every supplier must be licensed and traceable back to its source. Schools must test water and maintain documented hygiene standards, with inspection records published for parents to read. When children fall ill, the school must notify parents and health authorities within hours, and must issue a public statement with the facts it knows. Oversight should belong to an independent inspectorate that reports to Parliament, not to the same ministry it is supposed to audit. Suppliers with clean safety records should be rewarded in the market, and those who cut corners should face penalties with real teeth, including licence revocation and prosecution. Accountability cannot stop at the head teacher whose name made the headlines. Every official who signed off on inspections that did not happen must answer for it.

Citizens have a role too, and it is not passive. Parents should demand inspection reports from their children's schools in writing, and they should refuse to accept "in due course" as an answer. Civil society groups and the media must keep the post-mortem results, the source of the oranges and the inspection records in front of the public until every question is answered. Parliament must summon the Ministries of Education and Health to explain, under oath, why a warning from earlier cases did not become a national safety overhaul. Regional bodies like the East African Community should treat child food safety as a continental standard, not a local embarrassment.

Four girls, aged nine to eleven, are gone. Their parents will carry that loss for the rest of their lives, and the state carries a debt it cannot repay with condolences. Every child who walks into a Ugandan classroom deserves to walk out alive. Demand the inspections. Demand the answers. Demand that the next family is not forced to learn this lesson the way these families did.

Based on reporting by BBC