Photo: The Star

Statement over teachers' strike as Kenya union officials walkout of the negotiations early July.

Nairobi — Confusion reigned in Kenya's education sector for the fourth week running following a debilitating strike by the countries over 280,000 teachers.

Even though the strike was eventually called off by the Kenya National Union of Teachers (KNUT) last Wednesday, teaching did not resume as late as Friday following a Ministry of Education directive on the same Wednesday closing down all primary schools.

The government for yet a another time appeared to be reading from different scripts when on the one hand the Deputy President was meeting teachers to dialogue over the strike while on the other hand the Education Secretary Jacob Kaimenyi was giving the directive over the closure.

At the centre of the confusion is pressure from the teachers for the payment of some $553 million in commuter, house and hardship allowance according to a deal signed between the teachers union and former President Daniel arap Moi in 1997.

The agreement ended another serious strike then.

The government on the other hand maintained that there was no money to pay the teachers claiming that paying such an amount could easily interfere with several other projects lined up for this financial year.

"What the teachers are asking for is too much and cannot be accommodated by the state coffers. Again, we can only engage teachers through dialogue in a boardroom and not on the streets," President Uhuru Kenyatta said in reference to a court ruling that declared the teacher's strike illegal.

" Teachers should honour the court ruling and return to class while we engage their leaders over their welfare," the president added.

In the current budget read mid last month, the government allocated a paltry $200 million to the education sector indicating that it had no plans to honour the teacher's deal.

Controversially, the same government allocated $623.5 million towards the purchase of laptops for kids joining class one in an effort to honour one of its pre-election pledges of ensuring every primary school kid has a laptop.

"It is an abuse to teachers, most of whom are not even computer literate to shelve their pay agreement and instead go into buying laptops.

It is a clear show that this government has it priorities upside down," said Wilson Sossion the firebrand Chairman of the teachers'union.

The new government finds itself between a rock and a hard place balancing between honouring labour agreements with among others teachers, doctors, nurses and university dons and on the other hand reducing the public wage bill that is currently bloated.

"One of the priorities of my government is to keep the wage bill low as opposed to the current situation where is at over 15 per cent, way above the globally accepted 8 per cent," said the president during his inauguration in April.

Two days before calling off the strike, the teachers were staring at an imminent mass dismissal as the government had advertised for all the jobs through the Teachers Service Commission (TSC).

The TSC advert called on all trained but unemployed teachers aged 45 and below to apply for the jobs at their various country education offices.

Kenya currently has a teacher's deficit of 40,000 teachers amid a hiring freeze by the government on the basis of budgets. Tens of thousands of trained teachers are also unemployed and could jump at any opportunity to get a job.