At least 26 children are reported to have died and many injured in a fire outbreak in a straw and wooden school in Maradi, Southern Niger Republic.
According to the report by AFP, the fire outbreak on Monday, which ravaged classrooms made of straw and wood, consumed about 26 children who were between aged 5 and 6.
“Currently we have 26 deaths, 13 injured, including four serious”, declared the governor, Chaïbou Aboubacar, specifying that they were first-year students of preparatory course “who are between 5 and 6 years old”.
“We do not know the origin of the fire, an investigation has been opened to determine it,” said Chaïbou Aboubacar, announcing that “three days of mourning in the region of Maradi” had been decreed as of Tuesday.
This fire comes seven months after a similar tragedy in Niamey which left twenty people dead. In mid-April, twenty children aged 3, 4 and 5 had died charred in the fire of similar classes in a popular district of Niamey, “Netherlands”, bordering the international airport and built in an old clay quarry.
“This tragic event once again mourns the Nigerien people in general and the Nigerien school in particular”, regrets the government in a statement released on Monday evening.
Towards The Ban On Straw Huts?
The fire having been favoured by the presence of straw huts, the construction is once again called into question by the country. In his press release, the governor consequently announced “the formal ban of hut classes at preschool level throughout the country”.
In fact, in Niger, one of the poorest countries in the world, to remedy the shortage of classes, the authorities are building thousands of straw and wooden sheds where children attend lessons, sometimes sitting on the floor.
The fires of these classes in precarious and very flammable materials are relatively frequent, but rarely cause victims. Nigerien President Mohamed Bazoum recently promised to replace them with solid classes.
After the Niamey fire, “we drew the authorities ‘attention to the danger posed by these straw classes”, recalled Issoufou Arzika, secretary-general of the Niger Teachers’ Union (SNEN). “It is better to hold lessons under trees than in straw huts which have become inflammable graves for the students,” he said.
A country already in mourning
In addition, the school fire in Maradi occurred the day after the deadly collapse of a gold mine in the same region. “The provisional toll is 18 dead that we buried this morning. There were also seven wounded hospitalized,” Adamou Guéraou, the mayor of Dan-Issa, the locality where the tragedy took place, told AFP on Monday. Nigerian nationals are among the wounded, he lamented.’
The accident occurred Sunday afternoon when “artisanal wells collapsed” at the mining site in the village of Garin-Liman, not far from the border with Nigeria, said Adamou Guéraou. “Rescue operations are still continuing, there may still be bodies stuck at the bottom of the holes,” a local source said.
Monday evening, the government “decided to immediately close” this site “which presents threats to the safety of people, school attendance, occupation of rural areas, hygiene and health of populations, exploitation women, girls and young children “.