By close of business today, public university support staffs are expected to have laid down their tools, if meetings they are holding today decide so.
Representatives of support staff from public universities on Monday resolved to call general assemblies in the respective universities to discuss what they call unfair distribution of funds meant for salary enhancement by the Public Service Ministry.
The resolution was reached during a meeting at the Makerere Union offices this afternoon. In his July 10th 2017 letter to the Public Service Ministry Permanent Secretary, Musa Okello, the General Secretary National Union of Education Institutions - NUEI, says support staffs off all public universities will meet tomorrow to chat a way forward.
"In our meeting with you on the 07th July 2017 you guided that our team meets the technical team from your Ministry on the 10th July 2017 to harmonize the figures and report to you. As guided we met your technical team and we didn't resolve the issue as we hoped," Okello said.
Adding that; "given the above situation we are left with no option but to convene general assemblies in our respective public universities on 11th July 2017 to seek the members guidance on the way forward."
James Byomuhangi, a support staff at Makerere University, says the money allocated to enhance staff areas in public universities at the time it was promised was also distributed to staff of the new universities such as Kabale, Soroti and Lira, a thing they oppose.
The staffs also argue that the enhancement money was used to harmonize salaries of administrative staff to the level of academic staff leaving out support staff.
Bruce Twesigye, the Vice chairperson of NUEI, Makerere Chapter has warned that once the over 3500 affected employees under the support staff category in public universities sit tomorrow, they are likely to declare a strike to protest the insensitivity of the Public Service ministry officials.
Twesigye says the general assemblies of support staff will guide them on their next course of action.
On July 1, Catherine Bitarakwate Musingwiire, the Public Ministry Permanent Secretary issued a circular No.5 of 2017 instructing all accounting officers to implement the new payment structure of enhanced staff salaries in the 2017/2018 financial year.
The support staff say that some employees in administrative positions were moved to new scales that were not there during budgeting; and that such a change cannot be achieved without additional budgetary allocations.
