‘LABOUR’ MEN IN APC’S POWER CORRIDORS
Austin Isikhuemen canvasses the Obi/Datti ticket in order to bring Nigeria’s destiny back on track
Ordinarily, one would have thought having a labour activist in power or at least its corridors would augur well for organized labour. In Nigeria the opposite has been the case. I got thinking about this aberration after seeing the current ASUU strike and the diabolical roles being played by Chris Ngige of Okija shrine fame. He never ceases to announce that he is well versed in the ways of labour relations and management. Yet each step he has taken has been to scuttle ASUU’s dreams and, worse still, cripple it permanently and thereby send a warning signal to the rest of labour.
This is not to endorse all ASUU’s methodologies and tactics as a review of those may also reveal a not so impressive underbelly. But their case is just and their demands altruistic in the main. It is the federal government that has reneged to honour part of the agreement it signed freely with ASUU. Isn’t that what is called bad faith? And now the tactics being deployed look like those of a football opponent who wants to just toss the ball around, waiting for the final whistle. The APC government wants to keep the status quo of suspended animation till elections are done so they can push it to the next government. That’s how I read the judicial recourse embarked upon by the government. Ngige’s denial when his signature is all over the move is, to say the least, hypocritical.
Even more diabolical is the rumoured move to deregister ASUU. A scatter-brained move if you ask me. Using the non-rendition of audited accounts for four years as excuse, and at the same time allegedly preventing ASUU from submitting the same reports. It is sad a minister who prides himself as having organized labour roots is superintending over this mago mago and wuru wuru – apologies to Humphrey Nwosu. Ngige comes across as a very combative, loquacious and disdainful public officer. He is in the same mould as the current Education minister who walked out on Nigerian students.
How can public officials give directives to minions to refuse to receive documents sent by ASUU? Even when such documents were being demanded by the same leadership. I do not, and can never, support the lethargy with which ASUU treated the issue of rendition of audited accounts – if you are coming to equity you had better come with clean hands! However, is that not how many agencies and departments of government run in Nigeria? NNPC has long been accused of the same malfeasance, why has the same behemoth not been ‘deregistered’?
The ministry of Labour has not taken any action since 2018 audited report was not rendered. Then 2019. Then 2020. Then 2021. If Ngige decides to discount the Covid-19 lockdown era as if it did not happen and affect the readiness of these reports, can he tell the nation too why it took so long for the agency responsible to rise up to their responsibility and why his own ministry should not be ‘deregistered’ for inefficiency and dereliction of duty? Besides, why did the reports only become critical when their strike has become an albatross as election approaches. Nigerians are no fools.
So why does Ngige talk down on his former comrades? Do the crumbs taste so well that he can push his comrades under the bus? Is he pushing for an end to the system of collective bargaining as we know it? And why is his era being used to canvass the case for ASUU’s proscription considering his labour activist background? He wants to leave that unsavoury proposition as his own legacy. What has organized labour benefited from his ministerial interregnum? We are waiting to hear tales by moonlight of why the ‘ASUU audited report is full of inconsistencies and ASUU has a case to answer’.
I also looked at the rear-view mirror in Edo State of a few years ago where a national labour leader that had immense appeal ruled for eight unbroken years. If you look at the record, you will find that it was a sad tale for labour in the state. That was the time a harmless group of NLC and TUC leaders on a peaceful procession to call attention to their plight was beaten up physically by the state secretariat at Sapele Road in Benin City. Physically assaulted by a team led by a retired major that was made a permanent secretary as compensation for being previously made a scape goat for the demolition of Samuel Ogbemudia’s property in September 2011. He himself had, before the morally tainted compensatory permanent secretaryship, been publicly bundled like a cow into the back of a pickup truck in the pretence that he was not sent on that errand. All that bubuyaya was to assuage the huge public outcry.
Was any of the attackers who beat the state NLC chairman – Mr. Emmanuel Ademokun – to stupor arrested, prosecuted or sanctioned by the ex-labour leader at Osadebe Avenue? No. The instruction for the attack is alleged to have come from that axis. What was labour – NLC and TUC – asking for at that time? Payment of outstanding allowances! Was it not the same labour leader who ought to fight for the masses that seized the puny wares of a poor widow and told her publicly ‘you are a widow, go and die!’? Why would any sane man expect the candidate that people with such mindset are rooting for to become saviours to our the poverty-stricken countrymen and women in 2023?
Is it not a reversal of roles that in the same Edo State today, a non-labour leader-led government has implemented a minimum wage increase from thirty to forty thousand naira (33% increase!) without negotiation, noisiness or nonsensical grandstanding? And the same government is building a multi-storey secretariat for the NLC at a strategic location overlooking the Ikpoba river in Benin City.
Now that the working class itself has a chance to have a proper government of their own to be led by a man who has labour-friendly credentials, the future cannot be brighter. Peter Obi and Datti Baba-Ahmed represent the anti-thesis of the interests that Ngige and Oshiomhole are backing in 2023. Peter Obi inherited billions of outstanding pension and gratuity liabilities as Governor of Anambra State. At the time he left, despite the pitfalls the Ngige Okija crowd put on his way, no single pensioner was owed a kobo in pension or gratuity! He blocked all waste pipes and channelled the resources to development and value-adding projects and investments in the interest of the people of Anambra.
Like those committed to build the tower of babel and compete with God, confusion and affliction is being set among the status quo conservative parties today. The only way left to bring Nigeria’s destiny back on track is to vote the Obi/Datti ticket and get these men of integrity with competence, capability and capacity to take the driver’s seat. Anything short of that path will empower charlatans and scoundrels to keep us away from the path not taken that has kept us where we are. Let’s do the right thing so we can start to do things right.
