My contract with teachers

There couldn’t have been a worse time to be elected the boss of Kenya’s strongest trade union. The 260,000-member Kenya National Union of Teachers (KNUT) has seen its clout diminish since the death of its long-serving charismatic secretary general, Mr Ambrose Adongo Adeya. The giant union may also find itself revising its rules of engagement with the Teachers’ Service Commission – the teachers’ employer – which has been handed more powers under the new Constitution. In addition, there are some long-standing issues to address like the acute shortage of teachers in primary schools and the unfulfilled aspects of an agreement with the government dating back to 1997. David Okuta Osiany, the new KNUT secretary general, says he is alive to the challenges of his job but that he is unbowed. Mr Osiany, who until the last union elections was deputy secretary general, has hit the ground running. A few weeks ago, he scored his first major victory when a teachers’ strike called by the union paralysed learning in schools countrywide and forced the government to undertake to hire 18,000 teachers on permanent terms. The teachers had been working on contract terms Mr Osiany says that during his term he wants to see to it that the government honours all past promises it made to the teachers. “The 1997 agreement between the government and the union required the government to offer teachers an increment of 50 per cent for house allowance, 20 per cent for medical allowance, 10 per cent for commuter allowance and 30 per cent hardship allowance,” says Mr Osiany, 56.