Tribute To Comrade Joe Ajaero, NLC President, At 59

 By Denja Yaqub

When some leaders of The Guardian newspapers branch of the Nigeria Union of Journalists led by Gbolahan Gbadamosi, now a lawyer based in the United States of America were sacked by the management of the flagship of Nigeria’s newspaper industry sometime in the year 2000, they filed a complaint at the headquarters of Nigeria Labour Congress, then fully located in Yaba, Lagos under the leadership of Comrade Adams Aliyu Oshiomhole.

*Ajaero 

After attempts to resolve the issues through dialogue to ultimately reinstate the union leaders failed, NLC decided to massively picket the premises of the newspaper firm. Journalists from all the major print and electronic news media were effectively mobilized to cover the picket.

NLC And The Big ‘War’ Ahead

 By Ochereome Nnanna

The Nigeria Labour Congress, NLC, is saddled with three mandates. The first is the classical or labour mandate – fighting for the interests of the working class. The second is the social mandate – protecting the interests of the masses in an environment where the ruling elite have increasingly become more selfish, corrupt and incompetent than ever.

It was under the presidency of Comrade Adams Oshiomhole that NLC assumed the social mandate on behalf of Nigerians who were subjected to series of fuel price hikes by the Olusegun Obasanjo government. These measures affected the workers and the general public equally, so Oshiomhole led Labour to bravely tackle the Obasanjo government. From that moment on, the people started looking up to Labour to deploy for them whenever government introduced policies that stoked hardship.

Consumption To Production Is Mythical With Neglected Producers

 By Owei Lakemfa

It appears that Nigerians are fairly attuned to the new sing-song that the country needs to move from consumption to production. However, discussions at a conference on Wednesday, August 16, 2023 once again brought to the fore the belief in some government and employers circles that the wilful and conscious deprivation of workers constitutional and human rights would not affect production. In fact, in some cases, they believe that the abridgement of such rights is good for business and governance.

The setting was the 45th Anniversary of the Food, Beverage and Tobacco Senior Staff Association, FOBTOB, held in Lagos, and the immediate trigger was the paper: “Enforcing Workers’ Right In Nigeria” by Mr Andrew Egboh, Director in the Federal Ministry of Labour and Employment.

An Oil Producing Country Without Fuel

 By Sunny Awhefeada

The ongoing energy crisis manifesting as scarci­ty of petroleum products has for the umpteenth time portrayed Nigeria for what it truly is, a failed nation. Our failure is monumental and tragically so. A friend drew the analogy between Nigeria and a household that grows cassava, but lacks garri and the children from that home go plate in hand starving and begging whereas their parents’ farms hold thousands of cassava stems with robust tubers ensconced in the womb of the earth.

Nigeria prides herself as a leading oil pro­ducing nation, but like the man that lives by the riverside and washes his hands with spittle, Nigeria suffers peren­nial crisis in the petroleum sector. More than anything else, petroleum has been the most intransigent source of our problem as a nation. What has been described as the Dutch disease seems to find a lasting domain in Nige­ria.

The Struggles Of Nigerian Workers Against Inflation

 By Izielen Agbon

The inflation rate in Nigeria is currently at 20.5% according to CBN. The prices of bread, cereals, potatoes, yam and other tubers, fish, meat, oil and fat have increased dramatically. The Consumer Price Index has increased from 100 in 2009 to 465 in 2022. However, nominal or monetary wages have remained stagnant. The real wages or purchasing power of workers have reduced. Nigerian workers must examine past struggles to learn the strategies and tactics used by workers in the past in their struggles against inflationary trends in the economy. A look at the struggles of Nigerian workers against inflation in 1941 offers a few lessons.

Consumer Prices had generally doubled in Lagos between 1939 and 1940. In February of 1941, under the Defence Regulations (Public Notice No.15) of 1941, the Colonial State imposed price control measures on essential food items in Lagos. The prices of items such as pepper, gari and beans were controlled by the State. In March of 1941, other food items such as egusi (melon seed), rice, beef, mutton and pork were added to the list. The price control measures were also extended to provincial markets.

Where Is The Federal Government Of Nigeria?

 By Ray Ekpu

Going through the newspapers last week it seemed as though the Nigerian world was crashing, ready to come down and bury all of us. And it is not as if we are strangers to bad news; we experience it every day, every week and when a new piece of bad news comes it is easy for people to say nonchalantly “what is new?” But last week took the trophy. It was like the coming of the apocalypse, an Armageddon, some kind of tsunami.

*Buhari 

Let us pigeonhole the news into three sectors. First, the national strike by ASUU was joined last week by the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) and its affiliates. The strike had gone on for about six months without the government being able to resolve it.

How can any government worth the name allow its tertiary institutions to be shut for nearly one semester? It has never happened in this country before. And the amazing thing is that as NLC threatened to join the strike in sympathy, President Muhammadu Buhari, as evidence of taking action, commanded the Minister of Education, Mr Adamu Adamu, to end the strike within two weeks. I am sure that the minister who knows that resolving it is a matter of forking out a lot of cash, and he doesn’t mint money, must have laughed haughtily at the impossible directive.

ASUU Strike: Buhari Should Resign Now!

 By Tunde Akingbondere

Over the years, Nigeria has suffered the glitches of not just insurmountable challenges but deliberate ones, cleverly woven into a web of barricades by some overbearing elements whose job it is to plunder the country.

*Buhari 

These are the enemies strategically planted by providence to ambush the peace, development and accelerated progression of the dear country.  They have their ancestry in history and had infiltrated our marketplaces, educational institutions, public offices, churches and so forth.

No wonder Osita Agwuna wrote a fierce newsletter, which was presented publicly as a lecture under the Chairmanship of Chief Anthony Enahoro in the year 1948. The provocatively blunt newsletter canvasses the call for a sweeping revolution, it borrowed the diction of Thomas Sankara in clamouring for a total overhaul of our different sectors while laying to rest the factors which gave birth to the general strike of 1945, the Burutu Strike of 1947 too.

In Praise Of Strike

By Paul Onomuakpokpo

Until humanity blurs the power distinction that privileges the leaders and afflicts the led with misery, the magic for banishing strike would remain eternally elusive. Like in most post-colonial states, the power relations in Nigeria have rendered the majority of the citizens nugatory. The citizens’ input is not sought into how the resources of the nation are shared. Even if it is sought, it is not reckoned with when decisions are made.

This is why while the leaders have security, the citizens are left at the mercy of marauders, kidnappers and armed robbers. Again, the leaders can live in plenitude, thanks to the resources of the society, while the other citizens go to bed on empty stomachs. Yet, when the citizens say they are fed up, they are told not to complain.

Govt, Labour And Minimum Wage

By Paul Onomuakpokpo  

If workers under the aegis of the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) insist on their demand that they be paid a N56,000 minimum wage, they would set our political leaders on the path of thinking creatively about how to govern effectively. For what exists now is a situation where our leaders shield themselves against excoriation for their failure by directing the citizens to excuses that trigger their poor performance despite their genuine efforts to engender good governance.

Their major excuse now is that the nation is reeling under an economic crisis that defies an easy solution in so far as the price of crude oil has hit hard times globally.

Bent on shirking their responsibilities, our government whether at the federal or state levels apparently expects the citizens to banish the thought of their welfare being improved. Now, government officials inundate the citizens with requests to make sacrifices. They remind the citizens that they themselves are making sacrifices as they have reduced their legitimate pecuniary entitlements.

But like other citizens, the Nigerian workers are by no means deceived. For the political leaders cannot effectively persuade the citizens that they are making sacrifices on their behalf and at the same time not feeling the pains of the economic crisis like the citizens. Beneath the leaders’ claim of making sacrifices, what the citizens can see is insincerity . For the leaders cannot claim they are suffering like the citizens if their children attend schools that are different from the public schools that the children of the workers have been doomed by their economic condition to attend. Even if past leaders successfully deceived the citizens, the latter are wiser now. Those who must serve them must experience what has been their lot. The public officials cannot feel the pain of the citizens when they are still enjoying privileges that cushion them against the economic crisis.

Thankfully, the NLC sees beyond the façade of the much-touted sacrifices government officials are making and that is why it is now asking that workers’ economic plight be alleviated by their wages being upwardly reviewed. Clearly, the NLC before now had been agitating for pay rise. But the workers’ day on Monday only served as an opportunity to publicly make their demand. Even without labour making the demand, it should have been clear to government that the so-called N18,000 minimum wage being paid workers does not even have a palliative value. The high cost of living in the country now has risen with the prices of goods more than tripling.

Despair, Nigerian Style

By Paul Onomuakpokpo  

Whether or not our current leaders consider it a cruel fate that threw them up in these times that contrast with the heady days of oil boom, they must not keep on ruing their arrival on the political scene only when the party is over. For, great leaders, with redoubtable transformational savvy, have often emerged in the times of depressing national crises like war and economic collapse. The times of crises are not when leaders who have been weaned on a diet of ease and are imbued with the delusive notion that public office is a voyage into uncharted territories of splurging should remain in the cocoon of comfort, untouched by the afflictions of their people. Thus before our leaders is placed the uncommon opportunity of demonstrating their capability for navigating the nation through the treacherous trajectory of a myriad of emergencies.

But even if they were willing, our leaders cannot make a headway until they really appreciate the character of the tragedy that has befallen the citizens. In our nation’s case, it may only be in the period of the civil war that the people suffered more than they are doing now. Every other crisis with its attendant immiseration may pale into insignificance before the one the citizens are currently confronted with. The economic crisis has thrown many  people out of jobs and they can no longer  pay their rents. But just recently in Lagos, for instance, such people could still have found shelter if they were thrown out by their landlords or landladies.  Those whose pallid economic condition  rendered them homeless would have had the bridges  to save them from the elements. But urban development in contemporary times has made these bridges inaccessible to them. And even if they were still available, ritual killers  and rapists would have made them danger zones for the homeless to shelter under. And in the past, the hungry citizens ate from dustbins. But such culinary havens are fast disappearing.

Indeed, signposting their attainment of apotheosis, the dustbins and dumping grounds have increasingly become the dining tables of the poor . The scramble cannot go unnoticed as those who ought to throw the remnants of their food in those dustbins do not even have what to eat.  These are workers whose companies have collapsed because of their inability to procure the foreign exchange they needed for their operations. Others are workers who, though are engaged in their jobs, are being owed for months by their private or public employers. These hobbled employees are even looking for who to borrow from. Some of them who never went to religious places of worship like churches before now frequent there with the hope that help could come from there. But from who do they beg or borrow when all the workers are suffering the same fate? Those that may be in a position to be borrowed or begged from should be the members of the political class who are invulnerable to the crushing  economic crisis . Even the little the salary-starved worker has cannot buy so much since the prices of goods have tripled due to the widening disparity between the naira and the dollar.