(SeaPRwire) –   By: Adrian Kingsley

Twenty-eight children and one teacher are dead in Peshawar, and the official response has already fallen into a familiar rhythm. Condolences. An inquiry committee. An arrest. A promised safety audit. I have tracked public administration failures across South Asia for years, and this sequence is now so standardized it functions less as a response and more as a ritual. The roof of the Al-Khair School did not collapse because of an unforeseeable act of God. It collapsed because a structurally weak three-story building was loaded with additional construction weight, filled with children, and left uninspected. That is not a tragedy of chance. It is a governance failure with a body count.

The official facts deserve to be stated plainly. On Thursday, the roof of an upper floor at the private Al-Khair School in Peshawar gave way during lessons, crushing the classrooms below. More than 50 people were injured, some critically. Rescue workers, police, and local residents pulled children from the rubble and rushed them to Lady Reading Hospital, which declared an emergency. A local man, Samiullah Khan, helped rescue three young girls. His own son survived only because he stepped out of class for a drink of water. Police arrested the school’s owner. Peshawar police chief Mian Saeed Ahmed stated directly that the building was structurally weak and that extra construction had overloaded the roof. The provincial government formed an inquiry committee.

Now set those facts against what the institutions actually did before Thursday. Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif expressed condolences and directed medical assistance. President Asif Ali Zardari called for a comprehensive investigation. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s governor, Faisal Karim Kundi, ordered a structural safety audit of educational institutions. All of this is post-mortem governance. The audit order is the most telling detail. If audits were needed now, they were needed before children sat under that concrete. And the pattern is already established. In June, 14 children died when a tutoring center roof collapsed in Lahore. In May, four children were killed in a classroom roof collapse in Dera Ghazi Khan. Three separate collapses in roughly half a year, and each one produced the same machinery of regret.

The core problem is structural, in every sense of the word. Private schools in Pakistan operate in a regulatory gray zone where licensing exists but physical inspection does not meaningfully follow. Owners add floors to expand enrollment revenue. Nobody with enforcement power verifies the load-bearing math. Arresting one owner after the fact is cheap accountability. It costs the state nothing and changes nothing about the thousands of similar buildings still holding classes tomorrow morning. A serious response would look different. Mandatory structural certification before any school opens its doors each academic year. Criminal liability attaching before a collapse, not after. Published audit results so parents can actually choose. Until inspection becomes a precondition rather than an apology, the next Al-Khair is already standing, already full of children, already waiting for a hot afternoon to give way.

Author bio: Adrian Kingsley, an internationally renowned scholar of public administration and social policy with decades of research on regulatory enforcement and institutional accountability across South Asia and beyond.