TUC Pledges to Help Enthrone Credible Leadership in 2023

Onyebuchi Ezigbo in Abuja

The Trade Union Congress (TUC) has assured Nigerians that it would mobilise its members to support the emergence of credible leaders with great potential and vision at various levels the country in 2023 General Election.

Speaking at TUC Political Roundtable 2022 held yesterday in Abuja, President of TUC, Comrade Quadri Olaleye, said the union convened the conference to discuss, redefine, and strategize on how to rescue the soul of our dear country.

“Our aim is to work together to provide a platform to change the leadership recruitment process in Nigeria. We must ensure that credible leaders with great potentials and great vision emerge to lead at various levels if we conscientiously want to change the narrative. A people united can never be defeated! We must not derail again. Never again,” he said.

Olaleye said that the TUC has realised that it was the lack of active participation of the organised labour in Nigerian politics that is partly responsible for the pains Nigerians are going through today.

‘Today, we are here to discuss, redefine, and strategize on how to rescue the soul of our dear country. Some naysayers have said “what are they going to do differently this time?” I am of the opinion that we should not react to such, rather it is our action after this conference that would convince them that we are not ready to waste the opportunity in our hands this time around.

“Comrades, sometimes I feel ashamed blaming the politicians for the looting and mismanagement of the economy. I feel that way because it is the lack of active participation of the organised labour in Nigerian politics that is responsible for the pains Nigerians are going through today.

“We have not successfully tapped into the opportunity provided in a liberal democracy which emphasizes grassroots participation and negotiation of interests. Staying aloof would further worsen the situation as there is no dividing line between politics and economy. Our kind of politics is such that a winner takes all”.

“Hence, it has become very unsafe to consistently allow politicians take decisions on issues. affecting the socio-economic wellbeing of workers and by extension the Nigerian masses,” he said.

Olaleye also said that the reason for the incessant labour agitations either in form of street protest or strike action is because labour in not involved in the policy making process.

Olaleye added;  “They deliberately shield us but we are now saying no more. No more anti-people policies; no more fuel scarcity, no more unemployment and no more insecurity.

“Yes, we are saying no more ethnic and religious crises! Nigerians are entitled to decent work, good governance and social and economic justice. Enough of self-serving and insensitive political class at the helms of affair,” Olaleye said.

Guest speaker at the event and immediate past Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Prof. Atahiru Jega, said that Nigeria has been badly governed for a long time now, with some analysts claiming that “country has collapsed.”

He said that all the indices of bad governance are starkly evident, from the fraudulent ways and means by which conceited elite impose themselves as ‘elected’ ‘leaders’ in governance, to the reckless, self-serving, corrupt, exclusionary, visionless, parochial and unpatriotic disposition and manner they have been governing.

“Under the present circumstances in Nigeria, there is no better way for the organised labour to strategically advance the collective interests of the working people of Nigeria, than to join forces with other patriotic forces and actively engage with politics and governance, and especially the electoral process, to ensure that the governance process and indeed the future of Nigeria is rescued from the reckless elite who are greedily and blindly undermining the socio-economic and democratic development of our country; who are literally getting the country grounded and, as it were, leaving the rest the citizens high and dry,” he said.

Chairman of TUC Political Commission, Ayodele Olorunfemi, while welcoming participants at the conference, said Congress at its last meeting resolved not be as onlookers but raise the consciousness of its members on the political development in the country.

“If you are not in charge of political power, you cannot be  economically in charge. This is the irony of the GE working class people who create the wealth only for a few political leaders to enjoy.

“Nigerian workers must ensure that those who emerge as leaders are transformational and transactional as it has been. We must resist such transactional leaders”,” he said.

Olorunfemi said that workers have long been victims of bad governance in the country, adding that this has to stop because the constitute a sizeable population of the electorate that have the voting power to decide who wins in an election.

He gave example of the population of it’s members in transport sector which he said are over 10 million.

Comparatively, the union leader said that the present minimum wage of N30,000 which amounts to a mere N1,000 per day for the workers is not anywhere near what is being spent in feeding a prisoner in the country.

“We are not saying that they are taken good care of the prisoners but we are saying that prisoners are better than workers,” he said.

He said that time has come for the Nigerian workers to come together and work jointly to deliver the country from precipice,” he said.