After forty-three days of disruption in Kenya’s public hospitals, the nurses’ strike came to an end on Wednesday, September 10, following the signing of a return-to-work agreement between the government and the union. Seth Panyako, secretary-general of the nurses’ union, announced that his members would be back on duty within twenty-four hours.
The action, which began in late July, demanded the implementation of a collective bargaining agreement signed in 2017 at the end of a previous six-month strike. Nearly a decade later, that agreement had still gone nowhere, with the government citing budgetary constraints to justify the delay. Wednesday’s deal grants forty-five days to conclude negotiations on the agreement’s actual implementation, though it offers no guarantee that the dispute will be resolved for good this time.
The crisis had taken a broader turn the day before, on Tuesday, when doctors threatened to join the movement. The Kenya Medical Practitioners, Pharmacists and Dentists Union, the country’s leading doctors’ union, gave authorities seven days to settle the conflict or face a national strike notice of its own. Secretary-general Davji Bhimji Atellah denounced an unsustainable workload for doctors, who found themselves handling nursing duties on top of their own. He stressed that hospitals, already grappling with a shortage of doctors, could not function without teamwork between the two professions, warning that his union would not stand by silently as the healthcare system its members had dedicated their lives to was allowed to collapse.
This double threat, a hospital system already on its knees after six weeks of strike action and the prospect of a wider walkout spreading across the entire medical workforce, appears to have pushed the two sides toward a deal. Whether the new forty-five-day window will be enough to turn promises on paper into concrete action remains an open question, given that the previous agreement sat unimplemented for nearly nine years.