So do rogue employees!!

I was a lecturer at a local university when Dr Kilemi Mwiria [the MP & Asst Minister] formed UASU during the Moi regime. At a meeting in my university [not KU where Kilemi was], I made a number of enemies when I demanded to be told why we were asking for salary increments.

my colleagues thought I had lost some springs & screws in my head. "Of course we are paid peanuts" they said.

When I asked how they arrived at the "peanuts" conclusion, they said that the cost of living had gone up while our salaries had remained stagnant for almost a decade - apart from the few hundred shillings annual increments.

At that point I retorted: "Your employer is not you social welfare organisation. You don't get paid to meet your expenses; you are paid for the work you do. What you do with the money is up to you".

They came this close -> <- to lynching me! I was kicked out of the meeting and branded a KANU mole.

Now; at that time a lecturer was earning about 25k in a ridiculous arrangement where the basic pay was 11k and the house allowance was 14k. UASU was demanding 50k basic + 20k for housing.

I prepared a memo demonstrating the true worth of a lecturer. I based my argument on the amount of money the universities got per student per year [sh120k at the time]; the number of lecture hours an average student attends in one academic year [600hr]; and the UNESCO recommended student-lecturer ratio [12-to-1].

I further argued that at LEAST 50% of the university funding must go towards teaching and the punched the numbers into a calculator.....

The result was that the fair salary should have been about Sh180k per month. When I present this to my colleagues, they thought it was a joke. Nobody could imagine earning that much at the time!

So I sent the memo to the secretariat that Moi had formed [after declaring UASU illegal]. I don't know what happened to it, but I know that 15 years later, lecturers are still being under-paid [according to the value of the work they do]

Me? I added more effort in my such for an alternative job where I could be paid for my productivity....

PS: My suggestion also took into account that lecturers were over-worked. The stunt-lecturer ration was way above the 12:1 of UNESCO.

So I included a scheme where lecturers would be paid end-of-year bonuses depending on the number of lecture-student-hours they covered above the standard ration in a year.

In that year, my plan showed an average bonus of Sh500k. Mine was Sh380k since I was teaching one of the less popular courses.

There was also a provision that any lecturer with less than the UNESCO figure should be fired at the end of the year.

That's how to manage productivity: hard workers get rewarded, and lazy bones are thrown out.

Unfortunately @Mukiha, since then the lecturers have chosen to do less work to match their little salaries.. In the four years I was in campus, I had at least four lecturers who showed up for less than 3 hours of the required 35 hours in a unit.. One of the lecturers appeared for only 1 hour in a whole semester to give us the answers to the exam he had set... I, like you, was nearly lynched by fellow students for complaining.

What a shame!

Especially when I remember the number of times I went for night lectures [8pm to 10pm] to bridge the gap between the 8-4-4 curriculum and the university one ... for second-year students. I ended up doing 60hrs per semester instead of the required 45hr.