Why TSC should now harmonise house allowances

Not long ago, the Kenya Union of Post-Primary Education Teachers (Kuppet) announced the beginning of a campaign to press for change in the payment of house allowances for teachers by the Teachers Service Commission (TSC). The current policy, which has subsisted for decades, pegs teachers’ house allowances on their areas of service. For this purpose, the employer has prescribed four regional categories, viz: Nairobi; the large cities like Mombasa, Kisumu, Malindi and Naivasha; county headquarters like Nyeri, Eldoret, Kericho, Kakamega, Garissa, Kisii and Nakuru; and the rest of the country. 

Accordingly, teachers in Nairobi earn more than double the house allowances offered to their counterparts from the rest of the country. To highlight just two examples, Nairobi teachers at Grade C2, which is equivalent to Job Group K, take home Sh16,500 in house allowances while those from the rest of the country earn only Sh7,500. Nairobi teachers at Grade C3, equivalent of Job Group L, take home Sh35,000 while their compatriots from the rest of the country get only Sh15,400. The gaps are even higher at higher grades.

Any policy that begets such grotesque inequalities is not only unfair but flies in the face of sound human resource management principles and is, indeed, illegal. Article 27 (3) of the Constitution of Kenya 2010, as read with Article 43 (b), unambiguously prohibits all forms of discrimination and provides the right to decent housing. The teachers’ right to decent housing can be weighed on a number of legitimate parameters such as work experience, family size, special needs and others, but certainly not on one’s area of service.

Set as it was in an era when municipalities provided the bulk of housing for public servants in urban areas, the policy has become counterproductive to current national education policies. Back then, rental charges by the Nairobi City Council were considerably higher than those by other municipalities. With the vast majority of Kenyans living on their farms, public schools in rural areas tried their best to provide housing for teachers, while landlords charged inexpensive rents teachers could afford.

Those market dynamics have so markedly shifted that it is wrong to assume that teachers in Nairobi pay the highest rents in the country. Many more Kenyans live in urban areas, which have seen rental charges skyrocket. In some parts of Kiambu, Machakos and Kajiado counties, such as Kiambu Town, Limuru, Juja, Athi River, Kangundo, Ongata Rongai and Ngong, rental charges correspond to those in adjacent Nairobi suburbs. 

Many supposedly small towns, such as Migori, Nanyuki, Kabartonjo and Hola, have very high rental charges. Moreover, within Nairobi itself, rental charges vary from estate to estate, and even within estates. These changes have happened when schools can hardly provide housing for teachers. To get a full picture of teachers’ housing needs would take mind-boggling time and resources that the employer is just not suited to deploy. But old assumptions no longer apply.

It is fair to recognise that the current policy has run its course, and is now creating more problems than it addresses. The pay discrepancies, whereby Nairobi is at the top of the ladder, have created huge demand by teachers to work from Nairobi, many of whose schools are substantially over-staffed, while those in the periphery have yawning teacher deficits. 

What this means is that the policy is perpetuating the historical marginalisation of underserved areas and undermining the rights of children from those areas to quality education. Given the teachers’ role as consumers and role models, its effect on educational and economic outcomes across Kenya can only be graver.

We have availed ourselves to engage the employer in dialogue to bring this outdated policy to a logical end and in its place put a remuneration system that properly reflects today’s realities. At the very minimum, we want housing allowances harmonised based on job groups. Our cost analysis has shown that the new system would be affordable to taxpayers, who will reap its benefits immediately in the rational deployment of teachers that will ensue. The TSC already pays other allowances based strictly on Job Groups, and housing should be no exemption.

- The writer is the Secretary General of KUPPET