To seek to pretend that the current industrial action by teachers across the country is some kind of political contrivance, part of the wider pattern of political ‘cat-sparring’ that intermittently afflicts the nation, is to indulge in monumental self-delusion. This has been the government’s posture for all of the period that the teachers have ‘downed tools’, the political administration’s rant even as the strength of the industrial action has grown, failing altogether to recognize/accept that teachers are by no means the most militant group of workers in the country and, perhaps, more significantly, that the circumstances of their emoluments, when set against the weight of their mission, is an absurdity the remedying of which ought, surely, to be addressed without further palaver.
Much of the reason for President Irfaan Ali’s recent “have patience” response to the industrial action has to do with the fact that the incumbent Education Minister’s image with teachers is sufficiently threadbare as to render it most unlikely that there is anything that she would have to say that would placate the striking teachers. Indeed, since it is entirely reasonable to say that an increase in the teachers’ emoluments is manifestly doable, then why does the government and the union not go into a huddle and settle for some reasonable increase, particularly since not even the government itself can justifiably say that the nation’s teachers, given the weight of their responsibility are not, at this time, significantly underpaid. The view in some quarters is that an agreement to meaningfully increase teachers’ salaries at this juncture would end up amounting to some sort of a call for a ‘fixing’ of what we know to be the various other problems confronting the education system.
What the government has opted to do, rather than to move to negotiations designed to realize a reasonable salary increase is to, first, ‘huff and puff’ about the action taken by the teachers and afterwards to ‘throw in President Irfaan Ali’ and his recent “have patience” speech into the affray.
President Ali, it has to be said, is in no way regarded as the most rumbustious and inflammatory politician in the administration and it is conceivable that his “have patience” speech might have been found by the teachers and their union to be more ‘listenable.’ That might, perhaps, have been the case had the President not, ill-advisably, fluffed his lines by asserting that the strike was purely political. Such a remark, when viewed from a historical perspective, and given what we know to be the circumstances of teachers insofar as their emoluments are concerned is, purely and simply, unsustainable.
If President Ali felt that his first responsibility was to seek to ‘talk down’ the strike he may well have done much better if he had not sought to drag ‘politics’ into it. More than that, his reported assertion contained in the DPI release that government “continues working to gradually improve the working conditions for every category of worker” cannot ‘wash’ in circumstances where it is widely known that a great many of our teachers have long resorted to ‘second jobs’ (we are told that fast food establishments are particularly inclined to recruit teachers for ‘after school’ jobs) which they need to supplement their incomes.
What is significant about industrial action at this time is that it has come at a time when parts of the education system already appear unstable on account of issues like violence in schools and the Ministry of Education’s manifest failure, up until now, to rein in the problem. That, indeed, is the government’s biggest problem at this time. Not least among the others, seemingly, has been the failure of the Ministry of Education to either build promised new schools within the stated timeframes or to tackle the rebuilding of schools destroyed by fire in a timely manner, circumstances that impact negatively on education delivery, as a whole. That, as the President puts it, his administration is committed to affording teachers, nurses and public servants “the best life possible” comes across, quite simply, as a patently futuristic assertion that takes no account of the fact that, in all likelihood, much of the rest of the nation is under no illusions about the immediacy of the need that applies to the aforementioned categories of state employees.
Here it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the President’s recent pronouncement on the teachers’ strike sends a thinly veiled political signal enclosed in the kind of political wrapping to which we have grown accustomed. Where the plight of the teachers and their industrial action is concerned, President Ali should quietly reject the ‘advice,’ wherever it might be coming from, that the government continue to arm themselves with political weapons to combat what, manifestly, are differences that ought to be settled at the negotiating table. Teachers are what they are, teachers. They are not unrepentant militants bent on dismantling the education system. Their commitment to what they do for the nation has never been in question. To paint them as little more than disruptive and bent on doing the nation some unspeakable evil is, to say the least, both disingenuous and downright dangerous.
