Bullying won't work.

"What do you mean negotiate? I'll put a gun to his head. He'll either go back to work...or he won't!" Or words to that effect. That's how it feels with the Mandera walimu impasse. "Serikali lazima iheshimike na kila mtu!" That's the attitude that seems to be prevailing. It is not the Teachers' Service Commission or the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology that the recalcitrant teachers are defying, but Government itself.

That defiance must be snuffed out, if it means using the Directorate of Criminal Investigations and tame journalists to intimidate and browbeat teachers' unions' officials, using the machinery of the sector's bureaucracy to order teachers back to work or using the political machinery at both the national and county levels to paint the teachers in the worst possible light. This is a tactic that has worked in other situations and it must work in this one. If it fails, then what use is all that power that Presidents, Cabinet Secretaries, constitutional commission' chairmen, principal secretaries and chief executive officers acquire upon assuming office?

Lest you miss my allusion, the relation between the national Executive and its agencies with the teachers is essentially of one of master and slave. The slave cannot dictate terms to the master. It is un-biblical and wrong. When  the master demands supplication, the slave must lie lower than envelope. When teachers are ordered back to work, whether their fears have been addressed or not, they must pack their bags, pay up their life insurance premiums and board the first bus to Mandera.

One small fly in this cozy ointment has been the rather foolish decision to arrest quarry workers who seem not to understand that there is an al Shabaab cell operating in Mandera and would sooner than later set upon the quarry workers in a most brutal fashion. It isn't the arrest of these men eking their living in the abject conditions that is the fly in the ointment, rather that the National Police Service admits that there is risk in working in Mandera if one is not a native of Mandera. It begs the question, then, if the place is still unsafe for lowly quarry diggers, why should it be safe for teachers who are not known to keep mattock handles at hand for safety?

This is a pattern that repeats itself every time the national Executive is challenged, whether the challenge is legitimate or not. It overreacts. It makes bone-headed demands. Then it is made to look foolish when its demands are not only ignored, but laughed at in derision. The Mandera quagmire is an opportunity to address broadly the inequities of the past, especially in resource allocation in the education sector. The national Executive is blowing its chance by behaving like a colonial master dealing with a restless, incorrigible native population. 

Bullying will not work when Kenyans have seen the benefits of hard stances when it comes to industrial disputes. Failure to recognise this cognitive fact is fast becoming the reason why the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology, the Teachers Service Commission and the Ministry of Labour, Social Security and Service are the Achilles' Heel in an otherwise well-oiled juggernaut.Joseph ole Lenku is gone. It is time detritus like Jacob Kaimenyi were politely asked to parlay their skills elsewhere far away.