Kenya National Union of Teachers(KNUT) has asked teachers to desist from attacking the ruling government as that was reducing their bargaining power.

This was according to a member of the National Executive Council, Alex Dunga, who noted that constant attacks directed at the Kenya Kwanza administration and some union officials were indeed reversing steps made by KNUT to push for teachers’ goodies.

Dunga noted that some of the attacks through social media were targeting the ruling government and hence likely to ruin their bargaining efforts.

“We need to give peace to the leadership at the national level so as to negotiate on our behalf.”

He revealed that the NSIS is gathering postings by teachers on social media with regard to the delayed salary increase as that would thwart our efforts to fight for teachers’ interests.

“The persons sponsoring and executing the attacks on social media to disparage the union officials or ruling government are advised to desist forthwith.”

“Never castigate a leader whom you expect to negotiate for you before the government, you will be sending negative signals and that will affect the whole teaching fraternity,” Dunga said.

Adding;

“Let’s give the national office time and space. We have come from a bad time and it’s only dialoguing that would help us get what we want. It is so unfortunate that low pay slips owned by our teachers had made it difficult to contribute even Ksh200 for benevolence and yet every strategy made to push for salary increment was being fought by some of them in the social media.”

Speaking during the 44th annual general meeting of Taraji Sacco in Siaya town, Dunga noted that as a Union, they have a task to see to it that teachers get good salaries.

“In the year 2022–2026, we had negotiated for a non-monetary CBA with SRC because of the conditions then but we left a clause that will revisit the agreement once the economy improves. In October last year, we met TSC leadership and tabled a proposal of a 60 per cent pay rise across the board.”

The TSC reviewed the proposal and made another proposal of Ksh59 billion to the parliamentary Education Committee to be factored in the salary of teachers.

“Before the end of the current CBA, each teacher will have a salary increase and that will see Sacco, BBF contributions enhanced.”

He at the same time appealed to Kenyans to stop fighting the Junior Secondary School policy and instead embrace it at the primary schools.

“We as KNUT made a request to the select Education committee that went around to seek the views of Education stakeholders that they temporarily host the students in their respective primary schools.

“As the government was putting two streams in selected schools to host the JSS, we learnt that classes that were hosting class sevens and the exiting class eights were remaining vacant and advised them to consider hosting the students in their schools.”

Adding;

“We also learnt that parents would be overburdened by fee payment to students learning in boarding institutions for six years and hosting them in the primary will also give chance to our graduates who have never been promoted whole through to teach them so as to go with pay increment.

“10,000 teachers have been promoted as we speak today and we are asking TSC to employ P1 teachers to take the place of our colleagues who have been taken to JSS.”

He says this will give a chance for primary school teachers with P1 certificates to be employed. If you look at the ratio of employment from last week, Secondary schools were much more than the primary level.

Dunga insisted that the TSC must also consider promoting the teachers who had developed their careers despite obtaining grade C in the KCSE.

“These people who did Exams and got C that you (TSC) don’t want to promote, had developed their career through Diploma and hence deserve to teach in secondary school.”

‘We have 300,000 primary teachers trained and are un-employed and we have adopted a dialogue strategy and not protests that were embraced by our predecessors and it will work on the interests of our teachers,” he added.