…Charges unions to fight
From Adanna Nnamani, Abuja
President of the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC), Joseph Ajaero, on Monday, said that the country has badly retrogressed under the leadership of President Muhammadu Buhari in the last eight years.
He lamented the situation of things in the various sectors of the country, and expressed hopes that the incoming government will not toe the line of the current one.
Ajaero spoke during his visit to the secretariat of the Almagamated Union of Piblic Corporations, Civil Service Technical and Recreational Services Employees (AUPCTRE) in Abuja.
According to him, “We want a government that Nigerians will enjoy and this level of under-development will stop, because Nigeria is under developing. We are receding everywhere. At the point that Buhari took over government, in the power sector for instance, they were hovering between 4,000 to 5,000 megawatts averagely but in the past eight years, we have reduce to about 3,000. That is moving back from where we were. ASUU strike used to be three to four months, under his watch we started recording eight months of ASUU strike. We are receding.
“If you check infrastructure, it is still the same thing. If we were paying for air ticket 50,000 Naira before, we are paying about 80,000 thousand Naira today. “
On his expectations of the new administration, the Labour leader said “We are still waiting to get their own agenda, because if we follow from the manifesto of the APC, they will sustain what Buhari has done and if it is underdevelopment that they are sustaining, then there is a problem. So the NLC will wait for the agenda of the new government before we comment. You can see that parties no longer implement their manifesto. So that is why we are worried. We can’t talk about the agenda of any government. We can only wait for them to state their own agenda.
But I am saying that this is an APC government and ordinarily, parties sustain their ideology. If you check the US, Democrats and others.
“Nigerian politics is berate of ideology. If you check the issue of privatisation of electricity, it was an agenda and policy forced on us by the PDP government. The APC government, after eight years did not own up to it to say “we are sustaining it or we will jettisoning it” so what was their policy during this eight years? So there is a problem, and we should be able to hold them accountable, especially the forth estate of the realm, if their manifesto is not in line with what they are doing.
“Currently, we can’t judge them when they have not entered into office but we can equally look at their grand father, which is their party and predict that if they should behave like their grandfather, these are the likely outcome. Unless they decide to equally do change of name that they have now discovered that their father is not that man that gave birth to them.”
The NLC president charged unions leaders to be more daring in their fight for workers’ rights, stating that, “One good thing we want to do under our watch, is to make NLC a proactive labour centre, a fighting machine. With no apology to any human being. Whether you are a governor who whoever, if you step on our toes, within twenty four hours, we start a fight with you. You can go ahead and say Ajaero is a mad man. It doesn’t matter. That is our commitment and that is how we want to go about it. Some people may decide to be gentle men, but that is not why we are going to do about this job.
“I fear of late that the unions no longer fight. State councils no longer fight. I have experimented one or two things since we came onboard. If you stop fighting, unions will go into extinction. You don’t beg your oppressors. Begging will only worsen your situation.”