Removing hardship allowance from teachers working in Tinderet Sub-County in Nandi will affect their service delivery which could downgrade performance of schools, area Kenya Post-Primary Education Teachers leadership has warned.
While speaking in Tinderet during the union’s Annual General Meeting, Nandi Branch KUPPET Executive Secretary Paul Rotich cautioned that the idea was retrogressive and could lead to mass transfers of teachers from the sub-county, which has some of the top schools in North Rift.
“That hardship, the moment it is done away with, then forget about the quality of education in Tinderet. Teachers will move away from this region,” he warned.
Rotich strongly opposed the proposal by the government to scrap hardship allowances from some regions in the country without keenly looking at reasons that placed them under that category.
The Executive Secretary also challenged the Teachers Service Commission to review the allocation of municipality allowance which is disadvantageous to some other schools within the municipalities.
“Some schools are still receiving municipality allowance while others have not been factored in and a good example is Namgoi Secondary School and Kapsabet Boys within Kapsabet Municipality. These are schools that share a fence, yet Kapsabet Boys receives and Namgoi doesn’t,” Rotich revealed.
Rotich threatened to file the case in court to challenge the government over such glaring disparities in terms of schools’ municipality allowance allocation.
“The Teachers Service Commission is provoking us for sure because soon I will be forced to go to court so that close to 15 schools around Kapsabet Municipality are brought on board,” he said.
Addressing the same occasion, Nandi County Senator Samson Cherargei revealed that he was pushing for areas to be listed as hardship areas fit for hardship allowance allocation.
“I am pushing through Equalisation Funds, Article 204 to increase the number of hardship areas in Nandi County like Terige Ward, Cheptarwai and Kapchorwa Wards,” Cherargei said.
By Geoffrey Satia
