The fact that teachers have waited for a pay rise for two decades is scandalous

Eighteen years since teachers were promised a pay rise by President Moi’s administration, isn’t it about time the Treasury moved to honour the pledge and stop repeating the "no money" mantra?

A promise is a debt or as the Swahili would put it, Dawa ya deni ni kulipa (the medicine for a debt is paying up).

Children born the year the pledge was made are now acquiring their national IDs. They are adults. That some of them will soon join their parents in fighting a battle they found raging is the utmost irony.

Therefore, National Treasury Cabinet Secretary Henry Rotich would do well to settle the debt and turn a new leaf in labour relations between the teachers and their employer.

The importance of settling teachers’ dues is informed by various reasons. One is that the courts have ruled in their favour, which is probably the best way to end the cat-and-mouse game between the Teachers Service Commission (TSC) and the Kenya National Union of Teachers (Knut).

As it is, the union plans to sue the TSC for contempt if it fails to honour a court order to pay teachers a 50-to-60 per cent salary increase.

Secondly, the fact that almost two decades have elapsed since the pay rise pledge was given to teachers is scandalous.

Protestations that there’s no money won’t convince a kindergarten child in a situation where our mostly indolent lawmakers, who rarely make a quorum in the House, raise their salaries on a whim while more hard-working citizens wallow in misery.

A common argument against increasing teachers’ salaries is that they don’t work anyway, so they do not deserve a cent more than their current earnings. While I hold no brief for teachers, it is a fact that they are some of the lowest-paid public servants.

In a situation where a graduate teacher earns some Sh40,000 a month, inclusive of allowances and before taxation, one must wonder just how such teachers are expected to survive without supplementary income.

Moreover, teachers — and doctors and nurses for that matter — cannot be faulted for living by Sessional Paper No. 5 of 1974 (the Ndegwa Commission Report), which allowed public servants to dabble in business.

Insofar as the 1970-71 Ndegwa Commission on the structure of the public service made recommendations that killed the spirit of service among civil servants, it is hypocritical to expect teachers to be the ones to stick to their jobs. Arguments that they are making money elsewhere and should not expect any pay increase are disingenuous.

One of the most annoying arguments against honouring the teachers’ pay pledge is that no one forces them to teach; that if they find their terms of employment unattractive, they can seek greener pastures elsewhere.

Indeed! So, why haven’t the MPs and, in recent years, the largely illiterate MCAs abandoned their jobs for better-paying ones?

Treasury CS Rotich says he does not know where to get Sh17 billion for teachers; that the figure was not captured in the Budget. Be that as it may, the situation he finds himself in is not so much a problem of the 2015/16 budgetary omissions as it is a reflection of the contempt with which teachers’ grievances have been treated.

Class discrimination is another concern. We know that the children who are either idling at school or have been sent home until the teachers’ strike is resolved are not children of Cabinet secretaries and the like. They are the offspring and charges of masses of Kenyans, who cannot afford the fees demanded by private schools, where the rich take their children.

Typically, they have no voice to demand teachers’ presence even in this critical third term, when Form Fours are preparing for their final exams.

Come February 2016, when the results of the Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education examination are released, their privileged colleagues will have scored top marks to earn them space at the top universities, thus perpetuating discrimination.

Isn’t it about time the teachers’ pay issue was looked at as an issue of social justice that affects the majority of children, whose only sin is to have been born in less privileged families?

Ms Kweyu is a freelance journalist and consulting editor. ([email protected])