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By Daniel Kanu
Labour activist, Comrade Joe Ajaero, was a delegate at the 2014 National Conference.
The vibrant Deputy President, Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC), General Secretary, National Union of Electricity Employees (NUEE) in this exclusive chat with Sunday Sun speaks on sensitive national issues, including President Muhammadu Buhari’s scorecard, 2023 elections, INEC preparedness, election threat in Southeast, Peter Obi candidacy on LP platform, among others. Excerpt:
The President Buhari-led All Progressives Congress (APC) is gradually coming to the end of its tenure. So far what is your assessment in the over seven year’s political journey or where is Nigeria today?
That is a multi-million naira question and to respond to it will be a kind of assessment of the life of the administration of President Buhari. It’s going to take a book. However, I will say that every leader makes his or her own impact, like Frank Fanon said every generation out of relative obscurity produces, discovers its destiny or betrays it. When President Buhari came, he saw and started addressing the problems, but with lots of challenges. He met a nation that was already infested with security challenges and that was one of the key reasons some people, equally asked a retired general to take over. It may be uncharitable to put a blanket condemnation on this government and say they did nothing. But I think from an analytical point of view that the weight of the problem wasn’t clear to both the new government and even Nigerians. As days go by the challenges were getting higher and higher. I will tell you without mincing words that the level of insecurity, and the challenges posed by insecurity as at the time President Goodluck Jonathan was leaving office wasn’t the same thing as what we are witnessing today, it was increasing in leaps and bounds. If I take the South, for instance, you will discover that the state of insecurity there has increased in both arithmetical and geometrical progression. The one that was prevalent or prominent then was the issue of Boko Haram in the Northeast, and it is still increasing unabated and the government seems to be overwhelmed. But the extent one could score marks to the president will be done in a proportionate manner, proportionate in the sense that if there were 20 cases of insecurity during President Jonathan’s time and he was able to solve, let’s say five, and then currently if there were 200 cases of insecurity in the country and President Buhari was able to solve probably, 100. Now 100 of 200 will give you 50 per cent, and five of 20 may give you about 25 per cent, so unless we situate it from this perspective, in a proportionate manner, we may be giving a blanket assessment of what really happened. You equally saw the issue of ASUU strike. There was an ASUU strike then and there is ASUU strike now, some of them are issues that border on inheritance. Some of the problems now are part of the agreements that were inherited from the previous government and in a situation where you have paucity of funds it becomes difficult to assess. But that is not to say that there were things that should have been done better than were not done. Let’s look into the issue of the power sector, for instance, and this happens to be an area some of us are quite familiar with. The sector was not addressed during this President Buhari’s time. Buhari actually released funds as a way of addressing the problems in the power sector, in fact, the only government that has released more funds to make sure the sector works, but unfortunately, the problem is not how much funds you released, the funds were not tracked rather the funds were given to individual businesses and not deployed to improvement in power supply. The situation in the power sector remains static either in terms of the welfare of the workers, or in terms of building more power plants, three years are enough period to build and commission a power plant and I can tell you that eight years down the line, no new power plant was built. The debate we are having now, including at the National Assembly is whether the power plants constructed with state resources, especially from the Niger Delta states and their contributions, should be sold to private hands or not. Now, the Nigerian government has become a state that is just using the state money to build a power plant and hand it over to an individual when the reverse should be the case. The main plank of the privatization process was the erroneous belief that the private sector has resources and that government has no business in running business. But the government is now establishing businesses and handing over to individuals. This should not be the case and even the entire power sector privatization exercise that was supposed to be renewed five years after, has not been done. So, the present government released more money to the private sector which was now generating darkness and they didn’t stop at that if the government released almost N2 to N3 trillion to the private sector in the power sector still some private sector was increasing tariffs fortnightly, both officially and unofficially, then the people are at the receiving end. If you take out N2 to N3 trillion, the economy of Nigeria will be in trouble as it is now. And then you take off almost 400 per cent increase in tariff, then the people will be pauperized, that is the problem that we are having today as far as that of the power sector is concerned. Now the issue of oil and gas, the issue of de-regulation has not been addressed. There is a cabal that is working there that now says that you can’t refine petroleum products here. I have given the analysis before that my grandmother, when she harvests her cassava, she will sell some cassava in the market and keep the one we are going to eat, the ones we are going to process for garri and fufu, she will process it in the house and sell the remaining cassava in the market and use the money to buy other things. But the Nigerian professors of economics will now get crude oil, instead of them to keep the ones they will eat or use with their children, the ones they will use for domestic consumption they will carry everything abroad and by carrying everything abroad they will charge admin cost, the ship that will carry it abroad, the refining and bringing it back in foreign currency and then they will transfer the price and cost to us to pay. I say that is a primitive economics and I am saying that my grandmother who didn’t go to school to that extent apart from primary education is better than them. So, I challenge any Nigerian professor of economics that will come out to say that this is the way to go. That is why the price of oil is increasing internationally, especially with the Ukraine/Russian war, but then its impact on Nigeria is not there. If Nigeria is to sell its crude alone and allow our local refineries to refine, Nigeria would have been a very rich country now because what they are selling is crude and that would have helped the economy of the country, but that is not the case and nobody is complaining. I have said that petroleum products could be refined locally and I repeat here that it is not rocket science. The chaps in the Niger Delta are refining it and I think that the Nigerian government should license them to form a kind of cooperative association to refine petroleum products for domestic consumption. They should legalise it and then involve standard organizations to check the quality of what they are producing and perhaps improve on it if need be. Nigeria will work based on that, when we apply the right approach things will improve. Get our guys together they will refine these petroleum products for us, we don’t need anybody or any foreigner to teach us how to refine petroleum products. There are over six universities that are offering petrochemical engineering, so where are the graduates going to? We can refine petroleum products here with ease. Even the refineries we have in this country are young refineries when you compare them to refineries in other parts of the world, some over there are over 100 years and they are still producing, but they are properly maintained; but here we lack maintenance and we complain. I think that the Nigerian government should equally look at the capacity of the refineries we have here and work on them for our own benefit. There is no refinery here that is old. Petroleum products can give you up to other 100 products, by the time you fix petrochemical industries that produce different products millions of Nigerians will be engaged in different employment opportunities.
You have mentioned the issue of oil and gas. Are you in support of subsidy removal?
Who is subsidizing who? Remember the analysis I gave you about my grandmother’s cassava? You are subsidising on carrying the cassava we harvested on our farm to the market, the bus that will carry it you pay money for it, the person that will grind the cassava, the person that will fry it, the person that will load it back into the car again. All this money is not necessary because you are only subsidising corruption in our case here. If you have the one, we are going to use in our refineries here, the others you send to the market and sell them and they are all profit for you. You need to fix the refineries simple. Subsidy is created to empower some people, so the issue of subsidy should not be there. If you repair the refineries subsidy will die a natural death. You can’t just say you will remove the subsidy first before you repair it because you can’t repair it. But I am equally saying that eight years down the line is enough time for us to have repaired those refineries. If we have solved this problem of oil and electricity, most of the companies that left this country would not have gone because there is no constant electric supply, companies like Dunlop, Michelin tyres, and textile industries are no longer operating here. In those days, the whole of Isolo/Aswani areas in Lagos was a booming place for textile products. It was the same in Kaduna, Kaduna textile, Arewa textile etc. It was there in Kano and in different places in the country people were producing, but all that is now history. Peugeot was working, now nothing is happening there, nothing is working. You have to look at the issue of industrialization, the issue of real production, a production economy etc, only then will we start growing as a strong nation.
So in all of this, are you pointing accusing fingers at leadership failure?
We are plagued with leadership problems or leadership challenges and I need to say that our problem is that of leadership or problem of governance. There are individuals that have come into power with capacity and the best of intentions. President Buhari, if you ask me is one of them and that was why some of us wanted him to be president in 2015. But I will not say that the nation is jinxed in the classical use of the word, but I will say that there seems to be a wage or edge created between those who are leading and some of us, the poor on this side. I say this without mincing words that from the time President Buhari came to office, this poor side that we are, the common people, could not get information across to him and all the things that we wanted to pass across to him then and until now could not sell through. I could remember talking to his aides, groups that could reach him making presentations, but it didn’t see the light of the day. We were asked to do that before he was sworn in, but those proposals didn’t see the light of the day, so it’s like there seems to be a group that is intercepting good ideas from manifesting. As I said, we have honest people in leadership who will come there, but the extent to transform that honesty and good intentions, translate it to good governance, addressing the yearnings of the people becomes another thing.
Can that be linked to the problem of Nigeria’s structure?
Fundamentally, there is nothing wrong with our structure unless you are looking at the kind of government that we are running. The presidential system that we are running is too expensive, but if we are having a full parliament in session, it should not be full-time. It should be an assembly of professionals who come to parliament, maybe, they do serious work of one-week session legislation, maybe monthly, they are career people, lawyers, medical doctors etc, you pay them allowances for that period. We need a kind of parliament that professionals are elected/nominated into the parliament that will represent the interest of those areas. It is not the robust presidential system of government that you are mixing up with the parliamentary system of government that takes so much to run for a seat. Here you have people that will represent, let’s say the physically challenged, six persons, trade union movement, four persons, medical doctorsm six, six representatives of the NBA etc. I am just giving you examples in addition to the elected representatives of the people, then they meet there on basis of making the good laws that we need, then you pay them agreed allowances, the country will move forward. What I am suggesting will also be replicated in the states, and things will get better. If you see, the states have also taken over the functions of the local governments today and that should not be so. It’s not necessarily a problem of structure, but if you have people who are career people, but who pad budget, then there is a problem. Now there is no checks and balances and this is worrisome and affecting the country seriously.
How will you assess the ongoing presidential campaigns?
The issue is that the political parties that we have are clearly not ideological; some of them are formed on the basis of contestation of power, not based on clear-cut ideology or principle. Here it is on a winner takes it all direction. But here if you just look at the antecedents of the principal actors and if I have to give them a verdict, I think that all of them are market, market people. I have not seen any of them that is not a businessman or wasn’t a businessman. I have not seen any of them that grew up from a working-class orientation, but if we are able to drag them based on pressures to do good because the whole essence of governance is to do good then we can then assess them based on the good and the bad that were carried out during their time in office. We need to then look at their antecedents, capacity, character, competence etc.
It does not seem as if the entire Labour organization is in support of the LP presidential candidate, why?
The labour organizations own the Labour Party and they have not disowned it, but that is not a preclusion of alternative views. The labour organization is the most democratic institution, it’s a pan-Nigerian organization where we agree that even in our family where all of us are, say, members of the Catholic church that some if they decide to be Anglican or convert to Islam are free, that is what you are seeing/witnessing in LP, it is not an exclusion of ideas. People from any party can come and talk to labour and we will welcome them. Of course, it will be wrong for labour leaders not to listen to them. That is the whole essence of the constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, the right to a fair hearing. The Labour unions will listen to anybody because all the workers are not members and can never be members of just one political party. There is a need for dissent of views, of opinions, and that is exactly what the labour unions represent.
How would you rate the LP presidential candidate, Peter Obi?
I presume that Labour Party made their own research and presented its candidate. If you watch, this is the first time the LP will be ranked among the first three major political parties, that is even being contemplated to win the election by whatever assessment, that is a verdict already that LP presidential candidate is solid, it’s a 100 per cent achievement. I want to assess him based on the institution of LP because the constitution of Nigeria doesn’t have a provision for independent candidacy, so whatever is being talked about now is all about the LP, his party, that party and not the individual. The person you pick to be your candidate could be a selling point to that political party. So, LP has come to stay and they have shown some level of commitment and they have a credible candidate, who has the capacity, confidence, character, and vision to work for a positive change that will make Nigeria work, that will transform the country. We don’t want to translate LP to be trade union party, no, the LP means a lot whether you are a mechanic, driver etc, and you earn your living through your work, it must not be a trade union thing or those that belong to the civil service, it is all-embracing.
Do you entertain fear that INEC may not deliver a credible election?
There is nothing yet to doubt the sincerity of the president in giving Nigerians a credible election. I have not seen any signal, but I know that there are anxieties associated with every election, terrible anxieties about whether to be or not to be. It’s just like even during a football match the anxiety is usually very high. The anxieties that go with elections are on now, but I don’t see anything that will stop the election. If the election is free and fair, people will not protest, but if it is rigged or manipulated you will see people protesting which is normal. President Buhari has been a victim when he was tear-gassed and that even led to the death of Dr Chuba Okadigbo. I don’t think President Buhari will allow such to happen under his watch.
Some individuals are threatening that election will not hold in the Southeast…?
(Cuts in) You see, there are non-state actors and when non-state actors speak, some of us take it with a pinch of salt; some of us don’t take it seriously because it is not coming from a credible source. Ordinarily, in a state where everything is organized that person would have been arrested or brought before some institutions to make explanations on a such comment that an election will not hold. The state should know how to take care of such issues.
