Yes, you guessed right! The Cabinet is incompetent to make a decision in respect to the teachers’ strike.
Most if not all do not have their children in public schools and would never send them there. Most of the public facilities are for the poor.
Have you heard of a Cabinet minister including our health ministers going to a public hospital? Why would a president, prime minister or a Cabinet minister not go to a hospital, which is under their ‘management’ or brag to have delivered under their ‘astute’ leadership?
The political leadership in its immorality has provided an alternative for itself. They enjoy comprehensive health cover outside the Kenyatta National Hospital, provincial or district hospitals.
Those are for the peasants who studiously vote for them at every election cycle. They lack the necessary facilities, medicine and pay staff poorly. We pay our ministers handsomely! About a million bob.
That way, they can send their kids to private schools and colleges. Strike, strike all that you want you pauper lecturers, teachers and your children in public universities.
I support the industrial action across the spectre of professionals in public service. It’s not just about pay. It’s about improving the public sector and service. You just can’t be making ‘good’ roads to ease your way home. Improve our public hospitals and schools. Like yourselves, do also pay the other Kenyans as well. Let them also provide what you can provide to your children and families.
The latest decision by the Cabinet on the teachers strike is archaic, insincere and out of touch. They proposed to send the teachers home and hire ‘new’ ones – new ones who in effect, they can continue to underpay.
That is what they were communicating. Conscious that there are multitudes of unemployed Kenyans they have wilfully disenfranchised, they once again want to intentionally and unashamedly exploit the poor. Are these guys serious?
The next round of strike must be of the parents and students. Solutions to the education crisis and particularly the teachers’ strike must be sincere, sustainable and factors the long-term interest of our education sector.
The Constitution does allow our teachers to strike. Article 41 provides that “every worker has the right to fair remuneration; ...and to go on strike”. The Cabinet cannot purport to sack teachers on account of the strike. But Finance minister Njeru Githae and the Cabinet is buying time. They want to wear down the teachers and crush their will.
They anticipate that when the teachers run out of money, do not receive their September pay, it will likely scuttle their resistance, hence the strike. My solidarity to the class workers who toil and sacrifice for the nation.
I know parents, especially those with students in Standard Eight and Form Four, are extremely anxious. Though I believe all will be well. The teachers I have spoken to do care. All they desire is a long–term solution that not only improves their welfare, but also attends to the crisis in the education sector.
To find a real solution, we must formulate guidelines that compel the highest cadre of political leadership to use public facilities including attending to their own and their families health in public hospitals and sending their children to public schools. That way, they will formulate interventions that qualitatively improve the public sector.
The writer is a lawyer and former commissioner with the KNCHR
