Hundreds of non-teaching staff at public universities are in the second week of sit-down strike over the government’s failure to pay them enhanced salaries as promised last year.
In September 2015, President Museveni assured the universities’ employees that: “The arrears arising out of non-payment of enhanced salaries due to non-teaching staff for the Financial Year 2015/2016 be paid together with the enhanced salaries in Financial Year 2016/17.”
The enhanced salaries were neither paid nor budgeted for. Last year’s pledge ended a strike; failure by the government to honour its word has birthed another, one of a myriad constipating learning at Uganda’s public universities.
This industrial action is the biggest inherited test to First Lady Janet Museveni in her new assignment as the Education minister. Its handling will prove whether or not things will be done differently under her stewardship.
A Monday meeting to resolve the impasse failed. Reporting time for beginner and continuing students have been deferred, which means a reduced duration for actual teaching and learning within the semester.
Parents and guardians will in reality pay more for less, students too will obtain less-than-satisfactory knowledge yet staff will take home all of their pay intact. There is also the risk that lecturers and or students, if not both, could join or start their own version of a strike.
This conundrum, bad as it is, is a lesser devil. The worse problem, in our view, is the entrenchment of a culture in the country where the exercise by workers of their right of industrial action becomes a prerequisite to extract government or institutional concession.
This approach glamourises demonstrations as the standard for gauging achievement, or getting anything done or undone.
Universities should act, and be treated, as a pinnacle for knowledge production and invention, while offering noble dividends for society, far away from their current projections as towering embodiments of discontent and disruption.
We on principle reject the piecemeal approach to tackling the disparate remunerations for public servants.
As such, we re-state our demand for the government to establish a salary review commission to comprehensively address pay for all government employees and stimulate morale for better results.
Let the President keep away from issues of salary determination and enable institutions with better competence to execute that for the good of Uganda.
The issue: Salary review
Our view: We on principle reject the piecemeal approach to tackling the disparate remunerations for public servants. As such, we re-state our demand for the government to establish a salary review commission to comprehensively address pay…
0 comments:
Post a Comment