TSC and Knut should embrace dialogue

NAIROBI: In the unresolved dispute between the Kenya National Union of Teachers (Knut) and the Teachers Service Commission (TSC), the biggest sufferers are the helpless innocent school children. Their foundations have repeatedly been undermined and their future jeopardised.

Children are worth sacrificing for; including forgoing salaries and food, and giving them unreserved and unconditional love and treatment. Overall, the handling of the strike has left a bitter taste among Kenyans.

We owe children the God-given birthright responsibility of bringing them up to become responsible citizens with the best of examples. Instead, with the violence  displayed in the confrontational exchanges by those they look up to, they will copy the examples they see and hear of the aggression and the rudeness of leaders.

Children become what they are exposed to. They saw and heard that anyone can address the President in as vulgar a language as demonstrated by some people.

When children are not in school, they get exposed to drugs, engage in unprotected sex, watch pornography and sometimes steal. No one knows these things better than teachers and parents. Teachers, for the sin of being members of Knut, have not received their September salaries.

Their loans and rent obligations have suffered. They had to endure the prospects of losing the only jobs they know how to do. Parents of school-going children had to suffer the nightmare of keeping them at home, interfering with their work, from which they get sustenance.

The only beneficiaries, and for self-aggrandisement, were members of Knut. To demonstrate how true this is, look at the  the timing of the strike; just when the exams that would shape the children’s future were around the corner.  Exam period is the time when every caring Kenyan should be concerned about the welfare and future of our children.

The arrogant, disrespectful utterances and threats of the Knut leadership may have been popular with teachers initially. The utterances were distasteful to say the least; to the rest of Kenyans, and so much more so to the institution of the Presidency. They were unjustified statements that made parents worry at the prospects of seeing children out of school despite the fact they had met their part of the bargain by paying fees.

Teaching is an essential service. If there is any reason the current constitution is unpopular, it is for providing for the right to stage strikes by essential service providers such as teachers, among others.

Yet dispute resolution mechanisms, in the form of the Salaries and Remuneration Commission, the TSC and Labour disputes settlement, are in existence.

Had the parties embraced dialogue, they would have listened to each other with a view to increasing their understanding of the real and valid status of the financial situation.

The parties would not have issued statements based on unverified assumptions about the other's position and motivation. They should not have issued statements threatening or intimidating the other, merely to counter each other’s position, especially when the President intervened. In sum, the parties would have engaged in dialogue, which would have resulted in the common good. It would not have mattered which party delivered the most successful argument as was the case in the Knut versus TSC.

As it remains now, the whole circus has affected children negatively. The teachers' mortgages incurred interest on arrears. The parents had to bear the extra burden of keeping their children at home.

What a mess, all for an increase in salary, which the Government has pledged to effect when the country can afford it. All of this will return to haunt Knut.

It could have been resolved through dialogue, no matter how long it took, for the sake of our children. Now wounds have been created, and the dispute has not been resolved.