Of all the challenges Nigeria faces today, organized Labour’s brilliant intervention is its knee-jack pastime: issuing a strike notice!
Yes, things are hard and workers — Labour’s favourite street bogey — are suffering. Indeed, to be fair, everyone is.
Still, can you imagine a fire tearing at a farm; yet the farm’s foreman traps the owner in a hostile ring of irate farm hands, all yelling the owner cannot save the farm, without first settling the day’s wage?
Pray, if the farm goes up in smoke, will the foreman and irate work gang still have a job? That pretty much settles the wisdom of adversarial Labour in crisis times!
Organized Labour appears yoked to that Yoruba quip: profit or loss, the labourer’s wage is sure!
Shouldn’t Labour’s thinking have morphed from just loud, bellicose hands to, in troubled times, thinking partners — thinking minds that recreate wealth, and after, insist on a fair share for their members?
That fixation with willy-nilly demand — even with so little in the pot — has been the standard default of the factory-floor Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC), under Joe Ajaero.
The hitherto more tempered Festus Osifo-led Trade Union Congress (TUC) is fast losing its introspection to the Labour mob. Ripples just hopes this duo won’t crash workers’ interests with their fashionable rashness.
Yet, the Federal Government too must apply tact and wisdom in navigating the social bomb of its double-whammy tornado: the removal of subsidy on petroleum products and the floating of the Naira for imperfect market forces to make hay.
The two form the basis of its tough economic reforms, with the acute inflation they have sparked; and the pain and anguish they have wreaked in the land.
President Bola Tinubu and his economic czars should therefore ready their policy wonks to continue explaining why the present bitter pills are no hemlock to kill but rather, an elixir — very tough elixir, to be sure — to save.
It’s the government’s duty to explain and the people’s right to know, why the bitter gulps must continue. Aside, the government should pray — and work harder — for the reforms to soon turn a positive bend to, at least, have something less dreary to report.
Still, that threshold might not be so far away as it seems. For starters, pressuring hard the ready local refineries to roll out stock could well take some sting off inflation.
Besides, forex gained from importing petroleum products — when local refining takes off — should increase the available pool of dollars; and stanch the Naira’s free bleeding, though that forex market appears a bastion of sharks and crooks. But then again, the government must do its duty to checkmate these economic vermin.
Until then, however, the government has no choice but to answer for its own policy choices. The snag, though is: how do you engage folks who don’t want to understand? If you don’t understand an issue — and don’t even want to — how do you productively engage?
Again here, Labour takes the cake. It dismissed the Tinubu administration’s twin reform pillars as “ill-conceived and ill-executed IMF/World Bank-induced hike in the price of PMS and the devaluation of the Naira.”
That might well be. But beyond the bogey of “IMF/World Bank”, how did the NLC showcase its own superior thinking, beyond its predictable dogma that everything Bretton Woods must be evil? These folks just love to talk the talk!
Even with the perceived notoriety of IMF and co, isn’t that instant dismissal more of hot dogma that treats any reasoned discourse as more or less heresy? Pray, who mouths heresy in the open debate on public policy?
But aside from dogma, NLC’s ultimate joker is its populist appeal to the rumbling belly!
“Widespread hunger,” it fumes in triumphant rage in its strike notice, “is now ravishing millions of Nigerians, with the workers’ purchasing power significantly eroded, while insecurity has assumed an increasing dimension.”
From playing the people’s hunger tribunes, it went on to stack its cards, over unresolved union politics, simply because it likely backed the wrong horses in the sweepstakes involving National Union of Road Transport Workers (NURTW) and Road Transport Employers Association of Nigeria (RTEAN) unionists!
Yes, union politics is the NLC/TUC turf. But why don’t the Labour centres admit they are co-hustlers — not disinterested monitors — in those sweepstakes: the same charge they levy on others?
Indeed, pouring vitriol on policy and traducing those in government for wilfully punishing the people, by hard policy choices, is organized Labour at its distracting worst. Such emotive play to the gallery seldom offers any plausible alternative thinking.
Take hunger, again. It’s true hunger stalks the land. Still, do a content analysis of newspapers or radio/TV contents since 1999. Hunger stalking the land has been a recurrent theme.
Even back in President Shehu Shagari’s 2nd Republic (1979-1983), hunger and allied rumbling earned the late Alhaji Umaru Dikko, and his Essential Commodities (Essenco) outfit, deserved notoriety.
No: the issue is not playing dumb to food insecurity, which clearly is still a challenge, despite the agricultural activism of the Muhammadu Buhari years, which saw Nigeria come from nowhere to be Africa’s No. 1 cultivator of rice.
It’s rather the set way the media just echoes the hunger panic, without putting it in context, to better understand specific gains and losses.
Such uncritical echo of panic — even when there could have been in place hard and sustainable work to turn the tide — makes organized Labour and sundry lobbies to escape with emotional howlers.
Yet, such howlers have, so far, proffered no superior ideas. All they do is milk people’s misery: Buhari was the old devil. Tinubu is the new demon. Abuse is cheap!
The Nigerian favourite pastime, elite or masses, is to point fingers at critical times. NLC mirrors that tendency. Yet, the critical collective ought to pool ideas in a time of crisis.
But still again, the regime must carry own cross — absolutely no escape from that.
A more rigourous Labour should have hustled the government to fire, pronto, the ready refineries into production. That should be more job opportunities for its members.
It could also query the wisdom of the government (on deep reason, not cheap dogma) to float the Naira; and its bet that the huge foreign venture capital that could draw — to invest in road, rail, power, processed agriculture and allied critical sectors — will more than compensate for the current Naira slump and its spiral of inflation.
Instead, Labour is dreaming fond dreams of a N400, 000 minimum wage, without breaking a sweat where the cash will come from! Such antediluvian thinking!
Still, the government must continue to engage citizens, irate or calm, sober or hysterical, while it fixes its sight on the ball.
If it’s any comfort, the first two years of the Tinubu governorship in Lagos (1999-2007) was a welter and thunder of citizen abuse. Now, 27 years later, it’s a national reference.
That might yet be the story of the Tinubu Presidency. But it must first manage the present storm.
