The Kenya National Union of Nurses are muting a major strike should the recommendations made by the Salary Remuneration Commission on the reduction and removal of several allowances to public service workers is implemented. The union deputy general secretary Maurice Opetu said the nurses negotiated for the extraneous allowance by the previous government and the commission should not dare to scrap or reduce such allowances. “The union negotiated for these allowances, which the commission is now recommending for scraping and we will go down fighting to have them retained,” he said. Opetu said their union is in talks with other public servants union leaders to put forces together to denounce and defeat the proposed recommendations. Addressing the press in Kisumu, Opetu said nurses are ready to ground public hospitals operations to defend their rights which are being violated. “The government will witness the mother of all strikes if they go ahead to implement such recommendations. Nurses will shun their work and Kenyans will suffer,” he said. He says the commission has no legal mandate to set salaries for public servants and it goes against the new constitution to review remunerations of public servants. Opetu told the Sarah Serem Commission to redirect their energies to public servants who are withdrawing duplicated and unnecessary allowances and use it to advise the government to increase salary of the nurses.

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