Nairobi, June 26 -- Teachers across Uganda have downed their tools, threatening to throw the country's education sector into yet another crisis, a few months after schools came out of two years of a shutdown that kept thousands of learners at home.

But the current crisis is man-made, messy and multi-faced.

Barely a week after the national budget was tabled in parliament on June 14, the giant Uganda National Teachers Union (Unatu) called an industrial action upon learning about an allocation for an over 300 percent salary increment for science teachers and nothing for those who teach arts and humanities.

Unatu has called the budgetary decision a discriminatory policy.

By press time, the strike had paralysed learning in more than 12,000...