Wilson Sossion is no coward. He's a real man and a very smart one at that. I will tell you why in a moment.
The KNUT boss has a point when he says that other striking workers in the past have been paid their full salaries and yet the government now wants to deny teachers their salaries for the days that they were on strike. KNUT has already issued a new 7 day strike notice. And so after 3 weeks of a crippling strike it looks like our kids will be back home yet again. Nobody is talking about the school fees that parents have already paid in full for this term.
What has saved Sossion so far are his impeccable contacts within the security organs in the country and he has been one step ahead of every move made against him, even narrowly avoiding arrest over a contempt of court charge only to appear in court the next day flanked by his lawyers and in full glare of press cameras.
Attempts to find soft spots in his life to use to threaten him have so far come to naught. Luckily he has no spouse who has to go through the harrowing experience of worrying about his safety. The man is a widower after his wife passed on a few years ago and left him with an adorable son.
Sossion is proving to be an extremely annoying nuisance to the powers that be. Only that he is NOT the sole decision maker when it comes to calling for a teachers strike. Still, many in government believe that he is a major driving force in the decisions being made.
So far he has made only one mistake. Appearing at the chaotic funeral in Kisii which was addressed by CORD leader Raila Odinga. Sossion has to know that there are seem influential old men in the intelligence community who are seriously itching to link him to CORD and the so called March 4th Movement. In essence that would reduce the teacher's very genuine demands to mere bad politics.
If I was Sossion I would very seriously watch my back times two.
Meanwhile it appears that the government does not have the cash to pay teachers, even if they were willing to. Civil servants are yet to earn their salaries. In fact over the last two months or so they have been receiving their salaries late with the GOK paying workers in batches rather than releasing all salaries at the same time as has been the norm? Doctors are scheduled and other medical professionals are scheduled to down their tools and converge in Nairobi early next week to "look for their salaries."
What is really going on here? Yesterday an extremely lame excuse that even a standard two pupil cannot buy was given. The story is eti complications in setting up computer payroll after the "huge exercise" of shrinking the 4o ministries from the last grand coalition government into the 18 Uhuruto have. Apparently that exercise takes several months and tends to tempt the government to do things that show that it is actually broke. And all this after spending Kshs 100 million on executives jets and lots of other wasteful expenditure, including Uhuru's inauguration which cost several times the payroll of the entire government.
Some analysts are insisting that all this is part of a grand plan by Uhuruto to create chaos in the country and use that as an excuse to skip ICC hearings because they will be busy sorting out the mess. CORD leader Raila Odinga has made that exact claim a few times now. Personally I have been a little slow in buying this theory because I happened to know that some of the mistakes made so far by the brand new JUBILEE government were NOT deliberate. So how do we sort out the deliberate ones from the not so deliberate?
No comments:
Post a Comment