The Garissa Private Schools Association (GPSA) has faulted the Kenya National Union of Teachers (KNUT) for their call to withdraw their members from the North Eastern region.
While addressing the press in Garissa Town the Association´s Chair, Ahmed Hassan said that it was not right for KNUT to issue such an order stating that such a move would negatively affect education in the area.
“If teachers heed to the call by their KNUT Secretary General Wilson Sossion to withdraw their services from the region, then the education standards in the county would drastically fall,” Hassan said.
Garissa is already one of most poor performers in the country when it comes to national examinations.
This year, the county was ranked last together with Mandera with a mean score of 183 marks during last year´s Kenya Certificate of Primary Education (KCPE) examinations.
Out of the county’s 7,507 KCPE candidates who sat for the exam, only 1,306 managed to get more than 250 marks.
The teachers union had earlier called upon its members to withdraw from the area in the wake of the Mandera massacre where 28 people were brutally killed by the Al Shabaab militia. Most of those killed were teachers. KNUT had issued a statement urging all teachers who are not from North Eastern to vacate the security threatened towns of Mandera, Garissa and Wajir for fear of being targeted by the Al Shabaab.
“KNUT will not sit here and watch the union lose all the teacher to bandits, militia and other outlawed sect in the country, we want the TSC to act and protect the teachers it had has employed," Sossion had earlier said after viewing the bodies of the slain teachers at the Chiromo Mortuary.
Over 50 teachers camped at the local Kenya Defence Force (KDF) base demanding that they be evacuated by the government from the region on grounds of continued threats to their lives.
Garissa situated in northeastern Kenya has been occasioned by violence linked to the Al Shabaab militia for several years.