It Was A Foolish Idea For Teachers In Kenya To Ask Only For Salary Increment

Teachers in Kenya have been terrorized by the judiciary into minion wonks. Even their salaries decimated. This only happened because of foolish selfishness of the teachers. How foolish was it? It was, it is and it will be foolish in very many ways. First foolishness comes from overt cosmetic thinking of teachers when approaching the question of the dialectics between labour movement and the government as a respresentative of consolidated and personified capital.

Maybe this jejune of thought among teachers is a professional slough of teachers that can not be shaken-off on any maturity, but no I doubt, it is only fallacy of thought enhanced by deep rooted sense of property; meaning organizational mistake of teachers in their dream to become the lupenized bourgeoisie under full watch of their anti-thetical force in the shape of patrimonial capitalism in presage as the government ; a mistake that will make your mind to waver from politics to texts in the literature of Elizabeth George’s im angeschit des fendes.

Secondly, the underpinning consciousness of the corpus of labour movement in Kenya is sick and rotten as it is fully infected by a deadly virus of tribalism not easily to be detected in any hospital but by the political laboratory during the electoral experiment where the very members of the labour movement are shamefully divided to vote on a tribal line in full oblivion to the political consguences of their social choices to the economic comfort of labour the single ware of their trade. A very shameful blindness to an economic technicality and reality that labor will never rest till it seeks and acquires political autonomy.

Teachers alone cannot achieve labour conditions free from oppression. It is supposed to be an entire labour movement under the leadership of persons with workers consciousness but not by experts of onamatopia in the likes of the heavy-weight septuagenarian in the name of Francis Atwoli or by the human apparatus of political chameleonry like those posing currently as trade union leaders in Kenya.

The entire labour movement can struggle to change political leadership which is the mother of their trial-some experience in their daily profession venture in her search of the offensively illusive bread. The struggle can be an armed one or can be charged above tribal propensity and politics of ethnic proclivity with the olive power in the electoral ballot box, an opportunity for this social experiment in Kenya is two years shy in 2017.

The government as an organ of capital is fully aware that its political power is a protégé of its economic power measured in one supreme commodity now held in fetishism by those overwhelmed by bourgeoisie consciousness otherwise known as money. Thus the government cannot be a stooge on fashion to do away with the umbilical cord of its political fetus amid the delicate process of incubation.

Instead it can be shrewd and agile, Machevellian and snobbish to crush the head of the utopian teachers union out of its blind phantasmagoria that sky-rocketing salaries paid to teachers but not other workers will bring the paradise on earth in Kenya, what a folly in colour of silent dictatorship at its potential stage in the metamorphosis of the teachers from peasantry to patrimonial capitalism. Impossible!

Because apart from the judicial terrorism that has been dished to teachers in Kenya in November 2015, the government has a plethora of arrows in its quiver; they vary from retrenchment ,redundancy, bicketing, imprisonment, mercenary, over-taxation, disqualification, imprisonment, downsizing and very many others within the intellectual flexibility of all those that control capital. Any one of you gifted to bowdlerize ? the ball in your court.Thanks.

Alexander Khamala Opicho,
Lodwar, Kenya

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Articles by Alexander Opicho