WANJAWA: SRC once wage watchdog now weapon of injustice in lecturers’ strike

When Kenyans overwhelmingly endorsed the 2010 Constitution, they imagined a new dawn — a governance order anchored on fairness, equity, and human dignity. It was a social contract that placed value on every Kenyan’s labour, promising that those who serve the republic would be treated with respect and justice. Among the new institutions created to safeguard this promise was the Salaries and Remuneration Commission (SRC), a body entrusted to ensure pay across the public sector was fair, transparent, timely and sustainable.

Fifteen years later, that dream has dimmed. Instead of being a bridge between the state’s fiscal interests and workers’ welfare, the SRC has become a bureaucratic barricade — a stumbling block to justice and dignity, especially for the thousands of university lecturers currently on strike across the country.

The SRC’s constitutional role under Article 230 is to set and review pay for state officers and advise on public sector remuneration, guided by fairness and sustainability. However, the commission has overstepped its advisory role, turning it into a de facto wielder of veto power. What was meant to harmonise pay and promote equity has become an instrument of austerity and control, prioritising Treasury limits over constitutional ideals of justice. In doing so, the SRC has transformed into a technocratic fortress, where workers’ rights and pay justice are sacrificed on the altar of budgetary discipline, betraying the spirit of its founding mandate.

Nowhere is this betrayal clearer than in the ongoing university lecturers’ strike, led by Dr  Constantine Wasonga’s Universities Academic Staff Union (Uasu) and Dr Charles Mukhwaya’s Kenya University Staff Union (Kusu). At stake are not just salaries, but also the dignity of academic labour — the very foundation of Kenya’s intellectual and developmental aspirations.

The dispute revolves around two CBAs — the unfulfilled 2017-21 Collective Bargaining Agreement and the 2025-29 CBA that remains unnegotiated. In both cases, the SRC’s delay or outright refusal to issue timely advisories has paralysed progress. Lecturers, who have not had a meaningful salary review in years, are forced to down their tools while inflation erodes their purchasing power.

Matters came to a head when SRC misled the Ministry of Education into believing the government owed university staff only Sh600 million in unpaid CBA obligations. However, a forensic review conducted by Finance and Human Resource officers across public universities has since confirmed the actual figure to be a staggering Sh7.9 billion — precisely what the unions had maintained all along. This revelation not only exposes SRC’s gross incompetence, but also its disregard for accuracy and transparency in matters affecting livelihoods. Such misinformation from a constitutionally independent body is a serious disservice to the labour sector and an affront to industrial justice.

By dragging its feet on CBA advisories and freezing allowances under the guise of “harmonisation”, SRC has effectively flattened distinctions between professional expertise and routine administrative work. The message to Kenya’s scholars is unmistakable: your knowledge is expendable.

This is a moral injury as much as an economic one. University teaching—which demands research, mentorship, and lifelong intellectual labour — has been reduced to a job of survival. The consequence is predictable: disillusioned lecturers, demoralised students and a hollowed-out higher education system.

The SRC’s defenders argue it merely enforces fiscal prudence. But prudence without justice is simply oppression in a suit. Consider this: senior state officers enjoy car grants, house allowances, sitting allowances and other perks approved under the same commission’s watch. Yet when doctors, teachers, or lecturers demand a fair adjustment, the SRC sermonises about sustainability and fiscal space.

By hiding behind numbers and ratios, SRC has forgotten that public service is sustained by people, not spreadsheets. A system that punishes professionalism and rewards proximity to power is not just unfair — it is unsustainable.

Kenya cannot build a knowledge-driven economy on the backs of underpaid and demoralised intellectuals. The rhetoric of fiscal responsibility rings hollow when those who sustain the nation’s conscience must beg for what is rightfully theirs.

The answer is not to abolish the SRC but to reclaim it and restore its original mission—mediating between justice and sustainability rather than serving as a mouthpiece for austerity. It must provide timely, transparent advisories on CBAs, recognise sectoral differences, treat trade unions as partners, and root every decision in the constitutional value of human dignity, not narrow fiscal arithmetic. Its legitimacy depends on returning to this moral centre.

The ongoing lecturers’ strike is more than a wage dispute; it is a test of Kenya’s moral economy — a measure of how we value those who build our intellectual capital. When a commission created to promote fairness becomes an obstacle to it, the country must confront an uncomfortable truth: who watches the watchdog?

SRC must rise above its bureaucratic conservatism to defend justice, or it stands indicted—not just by workers, but by history itself. No economy can sustain itself by denying dignity to those who sustain its knowledge and conscience. Kenya deserves an SRC that balances books without breaking spirits—one that remembers that the constitution was written in the language of fairness, not fear and intimidation.

Edwin Wanjawa teaches Globalisation and international development at Pwani University and is a programmes associate at DTM, a Media CSO

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