A wolf disguised as a sheep will not be discovered simply because it bleats badly, but because of the “shit’ it leaves behind. No matter how lyrical Joe Ajaero waxes about his pummeling in Imo State, Nigerians must examine his claims with a quizzical mind.
The diminutive leader of the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) has decided to punish over 200 million Nigerians for the beating he received from his kinsmen in Imo.
The man who Nigerians labour to prop as the workers’ giant, has chosen to parade himself as the communal flyspeck bearing the plot of familiar predators in its droppings.
Ajaero, while addressing workers at the NLC secretariat in Owerri, recently, was accosted by suspected thugs who beat him to a pulp. He emerged from the ordeal looking, like a poorly trained pugilist fresh out of a shellacking by an unforgiving opponent.
Speaking at a press conference, in Abuja, he claimed that he was arrested by the police and handed over to thugs who beat him up, and threatened to kill him and dump his body in a river.
But the police spokesman in Imo, Henry Okoye, claimed that the police went to rescue Ajaero and take him into “protective custody.” The Inspector General of Police (IGP), Kayode Egbetokun, has since removed the Imo Commissioner of Police, Mohammed Barde, thus arousing speculations that the police did a shoddy job.
Perhaps IGP Egbetokun would order an investigation of the crisis, to determine if the police truly erred, and punish erring personnel to forestall a repeat of such misconduct.
On the flip side, pundits adduce the pummeling of the NLC boss to his immoderate flirtation with politics. Ajaero, apparently miffed by the loss of his favourite candidate, Labour Party (LP)’s Peter Obi, seems bent on scuttling the fragile peace and stability of the country.
The NLC has declared a nationwide strike, in protest against the brutalisation of Ajaero, in Owerri, soon after ordering the closure of essential services in Imo, including electricity, thereby throwing the state into darkness.
There is no gainsaying the NLC has morphed into strange forms under Ajaero’s leadership; the body’s pre and post-2023 election conduct, for instance, resonate extreme partisanship and anarchic tendencies peculiar to political actors with poor spirit of sportsmanship.
Few people would forget in a hurry, how the NLC boss, Ajaero, openly flirted with and endorsed LP candidate, Obi, during the 2023 presidential elections. In flagrant violation of non-partisan ethics obligatory of the NLC, Ajaero campaigned for Obi and forced the NLC to release an inglorious official statement calling for “all workers across the country to vote for Labour Party in the 2023 Presidential election.”
Ajaero also in his May Day speech attacked the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), accusing it of conducting a flawed election to favour Tinubu and claiming Obi won the election.
His claims of Obi’s touted victory depicted him as yet another emotive actor eager to hurl Nigeria into anarchy by declaring a candidate, who came a distant third, the winner of the February 25 presidential elections.
There is no gainsaying Ajaero turned himself to Obi’s mouthpiece on several occasions. En route to the polls, he applauded Obi’s promise to remove fuel subsidy but condemned President Bola Tinubu for daring to implement such a measure.
Ajaero’s anti-democratic stance hardly proffers solutions to the country’s myriad of problems. His ill-fated jaunt in Imo, for instance, further established him as a reject of his own people. On the eve of a governorship election in Imo, Ajaero tried to force an industrial strike on the State, claiming the Governor Hope Uzodinma-led administration owed workers as much as 20 months’ salaries. Governor Uzodinma has since declared that he was “not owing anyone.”
It is noteworthy that Ajaero has failed to invalidate Uzodinma’s claims with facts and figures thus validating suspicions about his true mission in Imo.
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Governor Uzodinma accused Ajaero of polluting the NLC with Labour Party politics. Of course, he enjoys an inalienable right to support any political party of his choice but he has no right to impose his partisan politics on the labour movement.
The NLC does not belong to the Labour Party and vice versa. Ajaero’s partisanship clearly jeopardises the integrity of the NLC. It has brought the labour union to disrepute.
It is worrisome to see Ajaero sully the entire labour movement by pushing his partisan LP agenda as a workers’ agenda. By his conduct, he has established himself more as an LP goon than a national labour leader. His antics furnish the venom of aggrieved candidates and supporters of the LP, who had at various times, tried to instigate anarchy and a military coup d’état.
Mayhem is the anthem that we should shun. It is the fruit of dissent that we must be wary of and I will continue to say this hoping the prospective tools – the youths – by which the masterminds hope to actualise their selfish plots, would listen.
The biggest misconception about insurrection or whatever the anarchists choose to call it, is that it would help actualise their allegedly stolen mandate.
It’s all dirty, greedy politics. The anarchists want the youths to fly the flags of their rebellion against the rule of law. They want everyone to brandish a bumper sticker that bellows: “Death to the Federal Republic of Nigeria!” simply because they lost an election, albeit deservedly.
Sadly, these anarchists enjoy the “obedience” and support of several youths whose minds cannot discern their selfish plots. Thus the latter waste their passion recycling hackneyed rage and engaging in bootless pursuits at the end of which they accomplish nothing.
Eventually, the smokescreen and noise of platitudinous chant begin to peter out and the anarchist realises that his or her rhetorical talisman is actually a paltry plated coin, not fit to pass around as a contemptible kobo. When a man becomes too accustomed to artifice, and disguising himself to others, he suffers a loss of self. Will Ajaero reclaim himself? Where is the self-professed “bleeding heart patriot” who – as a factional labour leader – backed out of a planned strike by the NLC?
Where is the Ajaero, who condemned and rebelled against the indefinite strike action planned by the Ayuba Wahab-led faction of the NLC in 2016 on supposedly principled grounds? What has happened to the Ajaero who opened himself, like a tickled palm, to the courtship of the administration of former President Muhammadu Buhari, in order to spite the Wahab-led faction of the NLC? Addressing newsmen in Abuja, Ajaero said his faction could not be part of Wahab’s industrial action because it was called at the wrong time and with wrong motives. He also accused Wahab’s faction of asking the government to write off the N2 billion loan the group collected, in 2012, to buy buses claiming that the strike action had “already been sold out before it took off.”
Ajaero said, “We thought we should have managed this in the interest of Nigerians but from the look of things, it appears we have to go our different ways.” Seven years on, Ajaero has mutated into a markedly different character. If truly, there is a perfect rout of characters in every man, Ajaero looms like an actor’s trunk, full of strange creatures. The NLC leader brings bodacious theatre to his brief.
