Teachers Service Commission (TSC) has finally resolved to act on the grievances raised by its restive field officers and further tabled a number of resolutions to help quell the tensions between the education officers and the Commission which had existed for quite a long time.
This is after the Commission’s Secretary and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Dr. Nancy Macharia unexpectedly showed up at the TSC Sub-County Director’s meeting in Naivasha today to close the 5-day event accompanied by Cavin Anyuor the Commission’s Director for Legal, Labour, and Industrial Relations and Ibrahim Mumin, the Director for Administrative Services.
TSC secretariat organized a five-day consultative meeting between the top management with its 348 Sub-County Directors (SCDs) which started on Monday, August 21 at the Lake Naivasha Resort after a similar event planned earlier and was aborted under unclear circumstances.
The first two days of the meeting were very stormy hence forcing TSC Directors Dr. Julius Olayo for Human Resource Management and Development and Mumin to contain the situation.
The restless officers while airing their grievances protested the absence of the Commission CEO wondering how she could miss and yet she was the one who called the meeting.
They had even declined to speak unless the CEO was there to listen to them, a situation that called on the two Directors to appeal to the officers to present their issues for onward transmission to the CEO.
It wasn’t until the irate officials were informed that the CEO was engaged in a meeting with the teachers’ unions for the formulation of a new Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) that their tempers cooled.
Dr. Macharia who unexpectedly showed up in the meeting later on apologized to the officers for not having been there to open the session, and jokingly wondered why they had ‘summoned her.
The closing session was immediately taken over by Mumin who then invited Anyuor to respond to all the issues that the SCDs had initially raised earlier which demanded TSC action considering the plethora of grievances raised by the officers in the recent past.
In response, the Commission resolved that moving forward; there will be no more TSC activity that will be undertaken by the officers without facilitation and that all stationary for use in the counties and sub-counties will be decentralized from the headquarters.
Recently, the TSC Commissioners who had gone to collect views from the field officers were shocked by the reports they got with some of them admitting that they had to accept handouts from schools in order to deliver on their work.
The officers had also complained that they were required to call schools from time to time to prepare data which comes with specific deadlines, but they were not being provided with airtime to do so, and further to write reports and submit them through email without being provided with data bundles.
The Commission also resolved that all sub-counties will be entitled to offices which will be fully paid for by TSC.
Consequently, the officials were requested to identify appropriate locations of their offices and apply for funding, where the Commission will pay all the bills relating to the running of the offices.
They had lamented over the high level of understaffing in the sub-counties.
Such a unit comprises the SCD, the Human Resource Officer (HRO), and one clerk with some even covering two sub-counties making the amount of work very huge.
Further, accounts for SCDs will be opened and funds will be allocated directly to the accounts. This will be a shift from the previous arrangements where resources used to be channeled through the TSC County offices.
The officers had complained that they lack stationary, which is very critical, in their sub-county offices to carry out their routine teacher management roles.
According to the officers they don’t have printing papers, envelopes, pens, staplers, folder files among other key office stationary in their offices.
The Commission has also resolved to provide vehicles to the SDCs to ease their movement while discharging their duties.
They were informed that one out of the three vehicles allocated for each Director’s office across the county will be allocated for use by SCD, with Mumin being instructed to immediately effect the directive.
The officers had raised concerns that they were facing a lot of challenges in transport with some wondering how the Commission expected them to commute from one school to the other in supervising or getting reports on teachers.
By Our Reporter
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