Daily Independent Online.
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Monday, July 05, 2004.
Who is afraid of the NLC?
By Dan Amor
They call it democracy, even though the
current taskmasters were selected. They were never elected in the true sense of
the word. And so, Nigeria’s lot in the present times is the same familiar
tapestry of famine, dictatorship, power drunkenness, deceit, hypocrisy and
corruption. And the Nigerian Labour Congress, NLC, the umbrella organization of
Nigerian workers, continues to bear the heavy cross of fighting for the total
liberation of the Nigerian people. The NLC has always been at the forefront of
the campaign against this hydra-headed monster called dictatorship and its
harmful effects. Even during those elastic eras of uniformed dictators, the
Congress had battled with utter confidence Nigeria’s gallery of rogues in power; and the
struggle continues. Yet, indeed, the muzzling of Labour in Nigeria started
during the iron - fisted tyranny of General Muhammadu Buhari in 1984. The
Buhari regime, bent on resuscitating the ailing economy raked aground by the
massive looting and recklessness of the Second Republic government of Alhaji Shehu
Shagari, went about everything with fury and madness.
Thousands of Nigerian workers were thrown into the
estranged wilderness of joblessness in a callous retrenchment exercise that
caught the labour movement napping. There was untold hardship in the land as
the government of the day mangled labour to a breaking point. The General
Ibrahim Babangida’s evil dictatorship which came on board in August 1985
consigned labour to the cooler until the 1986 student riots that erupted at the
Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria in which several students were shot dead by the
police. In an attempt by Labour to muster a little courage to challenge what it
perceived as wanton manipulation of corrosive State power by the government,
Babangida, who once boasted that they (the military in power) were
“experts in the management of violence”, accused labour leaders of
sedition and summarily swept them into detention. Also, in 1987, when labour
organized itself to resist an attempt by Babangida to wipe off the subsidy on
petroleum products, thereby pushing up the prices of the products, the
government again waved sedition charges in their face, arrested and detained
the labour leaders. Throughout Babangida’s misbegotten era, which lasted
eight miserable years, it was a game of hide-and-seek between his government
and labour.
It was indeed the IBB regime that corrupted the
labour union leadership, first, by building a N50 million NLC headquarters in Abuja and voting another N100 million to effect the movement of the
headquarters from Lagos to Abuja. The lure of the naira was coupled with the
lure of power when the then NLC
president Mr. Pascal Bafyau, was tempted to embrace the whirlwind known as
Nigerian politics. In fact, the wily devices of the Babangida regime to
compromise the leadership of Labour and render it effete were improved upon by
the Abacha administration when it imposed leadership on the key labour unions.
With labour’s leadership in government’s pocket, there was no one
left to speak out for Nigerian workers, much less, fight for their rights.
To extricate the people of Nigeria
form the stranglehold of military pythons, the independent and vibrant section
of the Nigerian Press in conjunction with the human rights community, had to put
up a formidable fight to end military rule and to institute a democratic civil
governance in the country.
Unfortunately, this was not to be as defenders of
entrenched privileges-the reactionary faction of the Nigerian ruling class who
brought the nation to this state
of hopelessness - still succeeded in imposing a disguised military regime
headed by an expired warlord on the nation since May 1999. The same old
Obasanjo who, as head of state opened the floodgate for the rampant violation
of intellectual freedom in Nigerian universities when he sacked several
university teachers in 1978 is the one in the saddle. For Nigerian Students,
Obasanjo still has his hands stained with the innocent blood of Nigerian youth,
cut down so cruelly, so senselessly, so inexplicably, so brutally and so indefensibly by his security agents
during the student crises engineered by his regime of terror as military leader
between 1976 and 1979. As for the Press, Obasanjo it was who first banned a
national news feature magazine The Newbreed from circulation in 1978 thereby
making it possible for successive regimes to now close down media houses with
reckless abandon.
His current plan to use the National Assembly to
emasculate labour following the latter’s insistence that his time-worn
economic programme should have “a human face”, is a familiar stuff
for the aging dictator. Given the fact that the present National Assembly is
indubitably the women wing of the ruling military party (the PDP), it will no
longer be a surprise to see that the NLC and by extension the voice of the
voiceless majority, are finally muzzled by the prevailing forces of retrogression and darkness.
The reason is that whereas democratic societies all over the world see
organised labour as a force to reckon with, dictatorships invariably see it as
a threat to their existence simply because labour can demand certain rights for
its members, and can even mobilize its members to actualise its demands. Because organized labour can express
the wishes and aspirations of its members, those who exploit workers and
subject them to penury and hopelessness have always employed all crude means to
silence them.
It is obvious that the chief reality in Nigeria today
is the reality of oil loot by
those who call themselves Nigerian leaders in the face of intimidating poverty
among the people. Given the essentially Hegellian structure of the Nigerian
state in which it has assumed political leadership in society through its
ultimate custodianship and
deployment of limited and unlimited power of coercion, any attempt by any individual or group to
challenge their elitist wisdom must be terminated summarily. It is therefore a
tribute to Obasanjo’s lack of understanding of the true meaning of
democracy that he has sent the proposed bill to the National Assembly with a
view to taming all voices of dissent. For him, the generality of Nigerian
workers is a colony of slaves or vassals who have no legitimate right to
comment on the way they are being misruled. But the danger of the President’s
anti-labour posturing should be
clear to anybody who has the interest of the nation at heart.
Undoubtedly, the government’s plan against labour is antithetical to its
proclaimed democratic agenda for the nation.
Killing the voices of dissent is anathema to
democracy, except, of course, democracy of the “home-grown” Abacha
variety. If labour in South Africa, for instance were as docile as envisaged by
President Obasanjo in Nigeria of the present times, that country would not have
attained the level of progress and democratization it has today. It therefore
behooves this government to change its mind concerning labour. Obnoxious labour
laws such as Decree 29 of 1996 must be repealed without further delay.
Nigerians must benefit optimally from the democracy they fought for. And they
must be prepared to fight with the last drop of their blood any further attempt
by this insensitive and heartless regime to kill labour which is undoubtedly
the only voice of the people. Indeed, Nigerian politicians who prefer learning
their geology a day after the earthquake, must remember that, labour, like the
press who lives to write the obituary of all repressive governments, will
outlive this wicked dispensation.
