Kenya: Solidarity with the University Teachers!

Joint Statement of the Alkebulan School of Black Studies (Kenya) and the International Secretariat of the Revolutionary Communist International Tendency (RCIT), 20 March 2018, www.thecommunists.net

Kenya’s university staff and lecturers are on strike since 1 March. They are protesting against low salaries and remuneration for academic staff as well as against the governments’ refusal to offer a counter-proposal for a new collective bargaining agreement, which expired in 2017. Furthermore, they demand funding to upgrade the numerous substandard and outdated facilities in Kenya’s public university system.

The strike was launched by the Universities’ Academic Staff Union and Kenya Medical Practitioners, Pharmacists and Dentists Union. On 16 March the Employment and Labour Relations Court ruled that the strike is illegal. However, the strikers are continuing their protests until now.

The strike has greatly affected students in public universities in Kenya. Last year the strikes combined deprived students seven months of learning due to Government failure to honour teachers’ requirements.

Alkebulan School of Black Studies (Kenya) and the Revolutionary Communist International Tendency express their solidarity with struggle of the university staff and lecturers. Their demands for higher salaries and better funding of the universities are justified. We support this strike because we support the struggle for higher wages of employees as well as for an improvement of the education system. We call for unity and joint struggle of all workers and students against low wages, precarious labour conditions, cuts in the education system and attacks on social and health service.

We understand our solidarity with the university stuff and lectures as part of the revolutionary struggle against imperialist oppression and capitalist exploitation and for a socialist future which will liberate the working people in Kenya, Africa and the whole world.