Kenyan teachers to wait longer for hefty pay as meeting fails to kick off

NAIROBI: Teachers will have to wait longer to get the 50-60 per cent pay rise a court awarded them on June 30.

This emerged after a meeting the Kenya National Union of Teachers (Knut) had requested to lay groundwork for the signing of a new Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) failed to kick off.

Knut had asked for an urgent meeting of the consultative committee on terms and conditions of service for teachers, but the Teachers Service Commission (TSC) had not responded to the request by the lapse of Tuesday's tentative date.

The  court gave the two parties 30 days to negotiate, sign and file a CBA. "We hereby write to demand that the committee meeting be convened in the next five days from the date of this letter," reads the letter signed by Knut Secretary General Wilson Sossion.

The letter dated July 3, 2015 said Knut is "under immense pressure from teachers to ensure that we sign a CBA forthwith without any further delay". Mr Sossion said the meeting was to be held Tuesday but TSC said the deadline lapses today.

"We have not been invited for the meeting as we had requested. We do not know what their intentions are," he told The Standard.

TSC Chairperson Lydia Nzomo, however, said a new date would be communicated. She said the meeting would not take place today because the commission had already lined up a series of commitments that cannot be postponed.

"We shall communicate to them for a better date when the meeting should take place. For now we already have some activities that had been pre-planned and which could not postponed," said Dr Nzomo. Sossion Tuesday said Knut had information that the planned appeal of the salary award was the cause of the delay.

"We warned them against appealing the court case. Even though they would lose the case anyway, teachers do not want that delay," he said.

However, Nzomo said TSC was aware of Sossion's letter. "We have not ignored the letter. We shall respond to it in good time," she said.