Blame Uhuru for teachers' strike, says House team

Teachers should blame Finance minister Uhuru Kenyatta for the failure to allocate money for the employment of 28,000 of their colleagues on permanent terms in this year’s budget, MPs have said.

Speaking at a news conference in Parliament buildings Tuesday, MPs who sit in the House committee on Education took credit for proposing cuts in the budget to get the money, but then blamed the minister for rejecting the proposal and instead allocating the money to the military.

The chairman of the Education Committee David Koech said the lawmakers had done their bit in pushing the government to address the teachers’ shortage in the country, but was let down by the minister when he rejected the proposal as adopted by the House.

“In the corrigenda (to the budget estimates) that he tabled in the House, the minister of Finance had the power to include Sh5 billion for the employment of teachers. He failed to do so. The onus was and still is with the minister of Finance,” said Mr Koech.

What the MPs did not say is that they cut a deal with the Executive in the presence of House Speaker Kenneth Marende to look the other way and postpone the recruitment of teachers until the next Budget. The lawmakers did this after the Treasury agreed to allocate Sh2 billion from the Contingency Fund to cover their back and future taxes.

They thus parried away questions regarding their priorities given that they so much focused on getting their tax arrears paid, and did not raise a finger when the Mr Kenyatta decided to allocate the money raised to the military.

The lawmakers said the minister ought to include the money for new teachers in the Supplementary Budget that is traditionally tabled in Parliament in the March of every year to top up the budgets.

The MPs who had sat mum as the House approved the Budget in the Committee of Supply yesterday said they could not “catch the Speaker’s eye” to be allowed to contribute in the debate and that perhaps, Mr John Mbadi (Gwassi), who spoke against the Treasury’s position to employ teachers, managed to alert the Speaker many more times that all of them.

Mr Koech revealed that when it came to the “guillotine process” where budgets are passed wholesomely without much debate, it was difficult to enforce the proposal to allocate Sh5 billion for the employment of teachers.

“There’s nothing much you can do. You either adopt the whole budget or reject the whole of it,” he said.

The MPs said the government ought to focus on the output from the pupils and students in Kenya’s schools and not spend every year allocating money to the Ministry of Education, yet the learners were starved of teachers, the effect of which lowers the quality of education.

Flanked by Mr John Pesa (Migori), Wilbur Otichilo (Emuhaya) and Francis Nyammo (Tetu), the MPs said there’s no way the government can raise money now to employ the teachers, but that the striking teachers should just wait for the supplementary estimates.

Teachers are on an indefinite strike that has crippled learning all over the country in many public schools and MPs are concerned that thousands of school-going children will lose out.