The International Labour Organisation (ILO) will celebrate its centenary anniversay this year. In this interview with TONY AKOWE in Abuja, its Country Director for Nigeria, Ghana, Liberia and Sierra Leone, Comrade Danis Zulu, speaks on the establishment of the agency, its relationship with Nigeria and the challenges ahead.
As Country Director of the ILO in Nigeria, what has been the impact of the world body on Nigeria?
Nigeria is a member state of the ILO. Three persons from Nigeria representing Labour, government and employers are members of the ILO governing body, which is the highest decision making body in the organisation. So, we look up to Nigeria to provide the lead in terms of social justice and the promotion of decent work across the continent. Nigeria has done quite a lot in terms of the protection of workers’ right. Nigeria has been through the trade union movement and has been supporting the trade union movement of other countries in capacity building and ensuring that they support their workers in terms of the governance system that are put in place to ensure accountability on the part of the trade unions.
What has been Nigeria’s contribution to ILO’s work?
Nigeria has also been working with other member states looking at how it can improve decent work at the ECOWAS level where Nigeria plays an important role within the scope of ILO governing body. The country is also taking the lead in terms of leading other African countries to make a mark on the different decisions that are made at the governing body level. Nigeria has been in the fore front of all these initiatives. We have also collaborated with Nigeria in a number of areas including working with the statistics office to see how we can measure employment in a much more reasonable way. I know that the statistics office hasbeen producing reports very regularly especially around employment and you will noticed on the website that they give statistics in the ILO formula, which we normally recommend to member states and they have their own derivation of the formula. The fact still remained that there is transparency there as they show the different ways of measuring. In 2017, we supported the government with putting in place an employment policy because employment is critical for a country like Nigeria. Unfortunately, for the past few years, we have seen a growth in unemployment especially among the youths, but we still remained convinced about government’s commitment to addressing this problem. We see that hopefully in the near future, the problem of unemployment will be addressed to the extent that it will no longer be a challenge for our young people here.
We are also looking at various issues at the moment, including working with government and social partners on industrial relations policy. Hopefully, we will see less conflicts amongst the social partners in Nigeria. We will see more progressive strategies and measures being made to improved the industrial relations environment in Nigeria for productivity and the great economy. So there are a lot of things we have done and we have supported both workers movement through the Nigeria Labour Congress, the Trade Union Congress as well as employers through the Nigeria Employers Consultative Association in building capacity for them to undertake the mandate that they have on their constituency.
As the ILO marks its centenary this year, what have been the challenges and the gains of the world body and what does the future look like?
For us, it is a very important conference because it marks our centenary as one of the UN agencies, because the ILO was formed in 1919, in response to the challenge of that time; the challenge that was brought by the industrial revolution which show increase in the violation of workers’ rights. Therefore, it was deemed that the ILO should be formed as an agency that would work with government, workers and employers to ensure social justices and also for the protection of workers right. So for us, it is 100 years of hard work, 100 years of mass improvement in terms of the observances of workers’ right, 100 years of development in the world of work.
How is the ILO responding to the changing world of work?
The world of work that we knew in 1919 has evolve to different work standards and different ways of doing work and the introduction of all sort of international labour standards, which prescribed how workers and employers should behave. We have seen an increase in the number of women accessing workplaces that were previously a no go area for them and this has brought about a change in legislation. For instance, there are legislations that permit women to do all types of work, which was not the case previously. We have seen a lot of work around the elimination of worse forms of child labour. As a result of the increase in poverty, a lot of these children have been forced to work. But we are working with member states including Nigeria to see how we can eliminate these worse forms of child labour.
Looking back at the past 100 years, do you think that if ILO had not been around things would have been different?
Yes. We live in a very dynamic world these days. One of the things that we are looking at is the theme in the forthcoming conference and the decisions on the future of work. For instance, one of the things that we are saying which will be very evident in the future, is that the relationship that we know today between an employer and employee will change because of technology, demographic trends, and other development indices, like people working from home.
So, the question is how do we respond to those issues in terms of the protection of workers’ right? If you are a worker working from home with no direct interaction with the employer, how do we ensure that either party is happy with the relationship? So, we really have to look forward and prepare ourselves for the changes that would happen. As you see already, in a number of countries, banks are laying off employees because of technology driven banking. We have ATM and you can do online banking. How do we support member states to ensure that these workers, who lose their jobs get their rights? How do we ensure that we prepare the young ones as they go into acquiring education that will equipp them for the future of work?
So as the world of work revolve, we can only do much in ensuring that the four strategies which made up decent work are met. These include protecting rights, ensuring equitable access to employment opportunities for both men and women, ensuring that social protection are available to all workers and lastly and very importantly, the concept of social dialogue in the discussion between employees and employers as far they agreed to what sort of relationships that they should have. It a huge task just the ILO or it social partners in Nigeria or the government to achieved a perfect world of work. But we can only strive to do as much as we can.
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