The Teachers Service Commission (TSC) has threatened to sack teachers who will be taking part in the strike that is set to commence on January 3rd, 2019.
TSC says it will hire thousands of new teachers should the Kenya Union of Teachers (KNUT) mobilize its members for a countrywide industrial action when schools reopen on Thursday.
The commission’s CEO Nancy Macharia has ordered the Directorate of quality assurance
Mugwuku Nthamburi to review information of 290,000 unemployed tutors registered with them in preparation for urgent deployment and employment should teachers go on strike.
Macharia wants Nthamburi to retrieve the names of the unemployed teachers, their phone numbers and email addresses as well as the level of training.
“You are required to urgently extract the data provided by the teachers in their registration details in the teacher online registration portal,” says Ms. Macharia in a letter to Nthamburi.
Even as TSC prepares to hire new teachers, KNUT has dispatched a circular to all its branches directing that no member should report for work on Thursday until the strike is officially called off by the union’s leadership.
KNUT Secretary General Wilson Sossion maintains that the industrial action is on unless TSC addresses four key grievances including promotion of teachers and halting of the contentious transfers of head teachers and performance contracting policy.
“We shall not resume duties until all these issues are resolved to the full satisfaction of the Kenyan teachers. We call on all teachers to fully participate in this historic strike in order to claim our justified rights,” Sossion says.
KNUT and TSC are among major…
KNUT and TSC are among major players, but the weakest links in the education sector. Their perpetual threats and counter threats has served only to undermine the quality of education in the country. Coupled by the inefficiencies and red tape bureaucracy in the MoE, it seems the education of our future falls through the cracks every time TSC and knut rock horns. Even as the president apologized for the confusion in roll out of the new system, TSC, KNUT and MoE still owes the other stakeholders an apology or explanation of the disconnect in our education sector.