STRIKE!

NAIROBI, (AP):

More than 200,000 Kenyan teachers went on strike yesterday to protest the diversion of government funds meant to hire more teachers and ease classroom overcrowding, a union official said.

The money has instead gone to the ministry of defence, whose spending is not publicly scrutinised.

The protest will affect more than 10 million children in primary and secondary schools and will continue until the government agrees to hire more teachers, said Wilson Sossion, who heads the Kenya National Union of Teachers. The children were due to return to class this week after holidays in August.

In the capital of Nairobi, classrooms were empty yesterday morning at St Mary's Karen Primary School in the wealthy suburb of Karen. At the Toi Primary School in Kibera, Kenya's largest slum, a teacher said gifted students were conducting classes without teachers. Students could be seen studying in groups.

The union wants the government to give full-time jobs to 18,000 teachers hired on temporary contracts and hire an additional 9,040 teachers, Sossion said. Some 79,000 teachers are needed to reach the internationally recommended teacher-to-student ratio of one teacher to 35 students. Kenya's public schools see an average of 50 students for every teacher, though some classes have only one teacher for 100 pupils.

The union projects a shortfall of 115,000 teachers in the next couple of years as the population increases.