From Adanna Nnamani, Abuja
President of the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC), Joseph Ajaero, has lamented that the country has retrogressed under the leadership of President Muhammadu Buhari in the last eight years.
He decried the poor state of affairs in various sectors but expressed hope that the incoming government of Bola Tinubu would not toe the line of Buhari.
He stated this, yesterday, during his visit to the secretariat of the Almagamated Union of Public Corporations, Civil Service Technical and Recreational Services Employees (AUPCTRE) in Abuja.
He said: “We want a government that Nigerians will enjoy and this level of under-development will stop, because Nigeria is under developing. We are rescinding everywhere. At the point that Buhari took over government, in the power sector for instance, generation was hovering between 4,000 to 5,000 megawatts averagely, but in the past eight years, we have reduced to about 3,000MW. That is moving back from where we were. ASUU strike used to be three to four months, under his watch we started recording eight months of ASUU strike. We are rescinding. If you check infrastructure, it is still the same thing. If we were paying for air ticket N50,000 before, we are paying about N80,000 today. “
On what he expects from the Tinubu administration, the Labour leader said: “We are still waiting to get their own agenda, because if we follow from the manifesto of the APC, they will sustain what Buhari has done, and if it is underdevelopment that they are sustaining, then there is a problem. So the NLC will wait for the agenda of the new government before we comment. You can see that parties no longer implement their manifesto. So that is why we are worried. We can’t talk about the agenda of any government. We can only wait for them to state their own agenda. But I am saying that this is an APC government and ordinarily, parties sustain their ideology, if you check the US, Democrats and others.”
Ajaero said Nigerian politics was bereft of ideology.
“If you check the issue of privatisation of electricity, it was an agenda and policy forced on us by the PDP government. The APC government, after eight years did not own up to it to say ‘we are sustaining it or we will jettisoning it’ so what was their policy during this eight years? So there is a problem, and we should be able to hold them accountable, especially the forth estate of the realm, if their manifesto is not in line with what they are doing.”
The NLC president charged unions leaders to be more daring in their fight for workers’ rights, stating that, “One good thing we want to do under our watch, is to make NLC a proactive labour centre, a fighting machine, with no apology to any human being. Whether you are a governor who whoever, if you step on our toes, within 24 hours, we start a fight with you.”