20100120
allafrica

By agreeing to suspend new rules on the harmonisation of hardship allowances yesterday, the government tacitly admitted it may have erred in formulating them in the first place.

It also confirmed that teachers had firm grounds for vehemently rejecting the move, which could have seen most of their 94,000 colleagues endure cuts of as much as Sh7,000 from their payslips monthly.
Click to learn more...

Essentially, the government had good intentions in coming up with the rules. However, the way it intended to implement the change in policy was utterly wrong, and smacked of bad faith.

The hardship allowance was a legally negotiated agreement signed in 1997, which should have been allowed to stand until it lapsed in three years.

It was, therefore, wrong for the government to haphazardly tinker with the arrangement without even referring the matter to the remuneration committee which has powers to negotiate salaries for teachers.

Nor did Public Service minister Dalmas Otieno, who announced the new rules, consult the teachers or their union representatives.

It took the intervention of Prime Minister Raila Odinga to apply brakes on the new rules when he opened the teachers' delegates conference last month - two months after the rules were introduced.

Although it is a good move to suspend the rules for now, we believe there is need to start fresh negotiations that can ultimately even out the allowances between all targeted staff.

This is mainly so because the disparities between teachers and civil servants regarding the allowances still persist. Such consultations should be informed by fresh data on the current hardship areas.

Given that the government has launched a survey that should produce the data, we hope the next classification exercise will be as accurate as possible.

This whole issue should serve as lesson - that there should be adequate consultation among government departments and workers before any major change in policy. The era of ministerial edicts is over.