Up till the last day preceding the proposed strike by the Adams Oshiomole led Labour and Civil Society Coalition, LASCO, some Nigerians were still not too happy that another round of strike action was about being embarked upon against a government that has proved over and again that it would not back down from its high horse of know all and be all. However, some hours before the strike action could take off, government announced a reduction in the price of PMS from the N52/N53 per litre to N49 per litre. This report merely looks at the power of opposition and why Nigerians should not continue to suffer a government which insists on taking them for a ride.
In the light of new wisdom, President Olusegun Obasanjo needn’t be told that he was becoming a laughing stock in the comity of heads of government. For a man whose mantra is a call to investment in his country, three strike actions, all within six months (and still counting) was not the type of news foreign investors would want to listen to.
And so, at a time when some Nigerians had predicted doom for the proposed strike action promised by the Adams Oshiomole led Labour and Civil Society Coalition, LASCO, a reprieve came when government announced that it would reduce the price of PMS.
Even as late as Monday, November 15, some Nigerians had called on labour not to embark on its proposed strike, complaining that the economy and democracy can not suffer such now, just as they pointed out that the strike would not achieve any result. The position was that labour should enter into dialogue with government and not go on strike.
However, reason is knocked off that position because those opposed to the strike action did not query government’s perpetual disobedience of agreements it had had with labour in the past - including a court order, that prices remain the way they were pre-October 2003, as well as the report of a government/labour committee set up to find a solution to the problem.
The warning strike called by labour last month forced the Obasanjo administration to institute the Ibrahim Mantu Committee on palliatives. And just last weekend, President Obasanjo ordered that N10 be taken off the price of DPK (Kerosene).
Now, because Nigerians have been known to have a legendary capacity to absorb shocks, past and present administrations have rammed very unpalatable policies down the throat of Nigerians.
Ironically, at every opportunity when Nigerians had attempted to resist such policies, specifically, through the instrumentality of a strike action, government sympathisers have always come up with a possible solution, one which seeks to talk labour into appeasing the government of the day by clamouring that it goes into dialogue.
The downside of that push for dialogue is that government comes out as the aggressor, drawing the first blood with its policy, and then labour is called upon to appease government by entering into dialogue. The present administration has consistently proved that it is very good at breaking agreements. It is this mentality which makes government insist on doing as it wishes, breaking agreements whimsically, that labour is attempting to challenge. But it should be understood (and clearly too) that if labour mounts the horse of docility, even as there seems to be no form of organised opposition to the present administration, the Obasanjo government would continue to ride roughshod on Nigerians. It has proved that it wouldn’t mind doing that. Which is why labour insists on confronting government.
In reality, constructive opposition to any democratic government is part of democracy and it allows for the alternative view - even President Obasanjo admitted this much in Finland on Wednesday. Such an opposition would not truncate democracy, it would serve to strengthen it.
Not to have an opposition would be to consign the nation to the vagaries of the mentality of a few people who suffer a delusion grandeur that they know it all.
The best way to appreciate the efforts of the NLC, as well as understand the mentality of the Obasanjo administration, is to cast the mind back to the speech delivered by President Obasanjo on Wednesday October 8, 2003. The speech was in response to the threat by the NLC to embark on strike, the second in four months, owing, specifically, to the Federal Government’s decision to increase the pump head prices of petroleum products.
Hear President Obasanjo: "What the NLC leadership must realise is that it has no mandate from whatever source to mobilise, much less call for anti-government action, the Nigerians who are not dues-paying members of its affiliate unions."
But Obasanjo got it all wrong when he charged that: "If the NLC decides to run its own transport company or engage in petroleum importation or refining, it is free to do so and sell to its members and whoever it pleases and at whatever price it deems fit."
What Obasanjo did not know or chose to ignore is the fact that the minute a leader counsels his people to go and provide for their sustenance, it simply means the government of the day has lost every moral credibility to remain a government. To ask labour to run its petroleum products importing company, or run its own transportation company suggests a failure of government on a grand scale.
If there is no opposition to Obasanjo, the spectre of doom would become magnified for the average Nigerian because the only veritable opposition to President Obasanjo’s economic policies which do not seem to have a "human face or the milk of human kindness", since the other political parties are as good as dead, is labour, or more aptly put, LASCO.
