Knut looking forward to a fruitful 2023 as it holds annual conference

We are delighted to welcome our delegates to the Kenya National Union of Teachers (Knut) 62nd Annual Delegates Conference (ADC) in Kisumu from tomorrow.

The conference offers our teachers, through their leaders, an opportunity to assess and re-assess the achievements and challenges we have encountered as Knut leadership and members at large, and see how we can improve.

We will reflect and come up with proposals and clear strategies for better service delivery to the teachers at all levels as envisioned in the Knut Constitution and in our service charter.

We call upon delegates to engage their intellectual faculties objectively to provide clear pathways, strategies and collectively draw a robust roadmap for 2023 to strengthen engagements with the employer and the government in an effort to advance the teaching profession and trade union agenda as desired by the founders of this great union.

We urge our members to work together since our collective voice is top on the union's organising strategy for success. The only time the union members were divided, teachers suffered greatly. As their leaders, we would never want to go back to the dark days of isolation from the rest of stakeholders in the education sector.

As leaders of union movements, we need to project our roles as critical catalysts for the promotion of our members' democratic rights which is fundamentally to transform their lives and work environment. We continue to do this by speaking for them, attending meetings, workshops, conferences and conventions to discuss the positive future of teaching.

We must struggle to create a golden ring of commitment, service and dedication and create a web of unbreakable sense of unity that will bring home victory for our members. We hope to bring them better pay and remuneration, secure and safe working environments and ensure that teachers' voices are heard.

Our National Executive Council (NEC) will present to the conference a detailed report on activities, accomplishments, future programmes and challenges the union is facing.

The Annual Delegates' Conference, according to our standing orders, is to have members debate on the report and approve or disapprove for the NEC to be able to transact leadership business in the preceding period after the ADC. I wish therefore to request that delegates be focused and to hold candid deliberations to take this union to the next level.

Among the areas where we expect delegates to deliberate with sobriety is the demand for a renegotiation of the CBA 2021-2025. The CBA was signed without monetary aspects and teachers did not like it. We have commenced structured talks with the employer to have this matter addressed.

Our proposal of 60 per cent salary increment across board is based on the fact that teachers have not been compensated for a rise in the cost of living since 2017.

Going by the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics, the annual inflation rate stood at 9.6 per cent as at the end of October 2020. This has continued to rise steadily. Given that for six years teachers have not received pay increment, there is need to compensate them for the period. It is only fair to extrapolate the annual rate of inflation over the six years which comes to 60 per cent. This is should one of the resolutions of the delegates.

We also expect delegates to mandate the NEC to pursue a clear return to former counties framework for all teachers who were delocalised now that the policy has been repealed. Many may not know that there is a dilemma over what to do with teachers who have expressed interest to go back to their counties since the positions they held there have since been filled.

The 2016-2021 CBA shifted the policy on promotion from academic qualifications to the appraisals. This disadvantaged most of our teachers who went further and acquired higher academic qualifications.

This matter has been a thorny one to our teachers and was canvassed even by the National Assembly's Education and Research Committee with strong recommendations being made to have higher qualifications being acknowledged and used for promotion. We are waiting for these delegates to debate on this.

We are alive to the fact that climate change to wreak havoc. We intend to use our school Knut representatives from our 24,758 public primary schools countrywide to plant at least 100 trees each within six months from January 2023 and seek the delegates' approval to allow us contribute some money to hunger stricken Kenyans occasioned through the presidential kitty. This will need the delegates' approval before transaction.