KNUT Threatens Nationwide Strike As Teachers Reject Transition to SHA.
The Kenya National Union of Teachers (KNUT) are threatening to go on the picket lines come January 2026 because the Teachers Service Commission (TSC) wants to yank teachers off their current private healthcare plan and migrate them over to the Social Health Authority (SHA). The move is set to coincide with the first day back at school.
KNUT bigwigs, led by the Makueni County big cheese Benson Ndambuki, are livid – pointing out that everyone else in the civil service is still able to get their private health insurance but teachers are being forced to switch to the SHA.
According to Mr Ndambuki, this move is about as fair as a fat chance, and teachers up and down the country will be pulling the plug on their duties unless something is done to address their concerns.
“We’ve told the union, and I’m here to say we’re giving this move the thumbs down. I don’t know why the TSC is so insistent on this – despite all our protests, it seems they just don’t care” Mr Ndambuki said.
He added that the union can’t possibly accept a compulsory switch to a public health scheme that hasn’t even been tried out yet and whose inner workings are still a total mystery to the people who’d be using it.
The TSC have invited KNUT to come in for a chat in Nairobi on Monday to talk through the SHA plans and a few other pressing issues ahead of the school year kicking off in 2026.
Both KNUT and the Kenya Union of Post-Primary Teachers (KUPPET), and the Kenya Union of Special Needs Education Teachers (KUSNET) have got invites to the discussions.
It all comes at a time when President William Ruto only just last year told the Education Ministry, the SHA and teacher unions to get together and see if they could come up with a better system for providing top-notch health services to teachers.
As if that wasn’t enough, hundreds of junior secondary school teachers turned out in Murang’a County last Friday to make it clear they’re not happy about the state of their employment situation.
They want a guarantee that they won’t be left hanging when their one-year contracts run out come December 2025 – they were hired on an internship basis in Nov 2024 and deployed in Jan 2025, and are still waiting to find out if they’re going to be permanent staff or not.
KNUT Threatens Nationwide Strike As Teachers Reject Transition to SHA.
