School children in a primary school in Nairobi. Many learners are anxious since they do not know when the schools will re-open.
One would have thought that now that a court in Kenya pronounced that teachers should suspend their strike and go back to school that learning would resume. How wrong we were! It is sad that such an important sector as education should go through the kind of shenanigans that we have seen in the country lately. Like health, education is one sector that should not be allowed to go to the dogs. If you are a stranger to the happenings in Kenya, here is the background to this story. The government of Kenya closed all public and private schools last week because of a biting teachers’ strike. The Kenya National Union of Teachers (KNUT) and Kenya Post-Primary Education Teachers (KUPPET) want government to implement a 50-60% salary increase announced by the courts. None less that President Uhuru Kenyatta said government has no money, “can’t pay and won’t pay!” This action by the government came at a very critical time in the school calendar – just when the schools are about to administer exams to schools pupils who will be sitting for their end of year exams. As they say, it is the grass that suffers when two bulls are fighting. In the current push and pull between the government and the teachers, it is the innocent school-going children who are suffering for a mistake not of their making. As is typical to any kind of political-social issue in Kenya, the debate around the education issue has divided Kenyans right down in the middle. The die-hard government supporters are fully behind the government’s move to close all public and private schools. On the other end, opposition supporters are totally opposed to the move to close schools, and the government’s announcement that it is unable to increase the teachers’ salary. The opposition also waded into the debate and muddied the waters by holding a rally, where they castigated the government and announced a plan to raise funds to support teachers whom the government had threatened not to pay their September salaries. All this is happening while children are at home and the teachers’ union is digging in and demanding full implementation of the salary increment before they can go back to class. It is sad that children are at home while politicians have seen this as an opportunity to flex their muscles again. The children have become pawns in a political chess-board! The government should rise to the occasion and provide the leadership needed to bring to an end the current impasse. The government should not abdicate its responsibility of leading to other third parties like parliament and the judiciary. Now that teachers have defied the court order and refused to go back to school, no one is sure what will happen because the government itself lacks the moral authority to order them to do so or go back to court and ask that the union leaders be jailed for contempt of court. Government itself did the very thing that the union officials have done – they disobeyed a court order. They set a precedent that will haunt us for many years to come. All in all, the government should not have allowed this dispute to go this far because now there are court orders that have to be obeyed. The best the government can do to extricate itself out of the situation is to eat humble pie, accept that its officers made a blunder and then go back to the drawing board and negotiate with the teachers again. Whereas the government says it has no money and paying teachers would lead to demand by other civil servants, some economists have said that the government can pay the teachers comfortably if only it can tinker with its budget. After all, what is more important, they say, is it having infrastructure like laptops and electricity in schools or having teachers who will assist the learners to use their gadgets? As things stand now, the education system is under siege from chest-thumping politicos whose children are in private schools. Only those with foresight and a heart for children will save the situation. Who will that be?
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