Awada kerikeri was a very popular Yoruba comedy programme some thirty years ago, well before the glitz and glamour of “Nollywood”. It was the kind of awada (comedy) that would make you almost laugh your heart out, in a keri keri manner. Watching the unfolding drama over instituting a new minimum wage in the country, one cannot but see a streak of the comic, but not one that would make many a worker smile not to talk of laugh. The governors and even the presidency could hardly wait for the ink on the agreement signed to stave off a (warning) general strike last week to dry, before they showed their true anti-workers colour. It seems the deferred strike might still be looming as further negotiations have seen the government sides remaining headstrong on not complying with the spirit and letters of their agreements with labour, obviously buoyed by their ability to have successfully manoeuvred out of the pathway of mass workers anger.
Awada kerikeri was a very popular Yoruba comedy programme some thirty years ago, well before the glitz and glamour of “Nollywood”. It was the kind of awada (comedy) that would make you almost laugh your heart out, in a keri keri manner. Watching the unfolding drama over instituting a new minimum wage in the country, one cannot but see a streak of the comic, but not one that would make many a worker smile not to talk of laugh. The governors and even the presidency could hardly wait for the ink on the agreement signed to stave off a (warning) general strike last week to dry, before they showed their true anti-workers colour. It seems the deferred strike might still be looming as further negotiations have seen the government sides remaining headstrong on not complying with the spirit and letters of their agreements with labour, obviously buoyed by their ability to have successfully manoeuvred out of the pathway of mass workers anger.
It is pertinent to point out a few things at this point. First is the falsehood in the assertion that the various governments can not pay the workers the meagre N18,000.00 minimum wage, which Governor Suswam of Benue state declared as a “time bomb” and for further measure claims that even if workers in the state were to go on strike for one whole year, that would not make his administration to pay the new wages.
Several representatives of the establishment including those of the Salaries, Wages and Income Commission and the Ministry of Finance have pointed out that this is not true, as I noted last week. More importantly, the supposed inability to pay flies in the face of mega “remuneration” which the supposed representatives of the people “earn”. This might be an opportunity for the trade union movement to test the veracity of the Freedom of Information Act by demanding and scrutinising the fine details of federal allocations to states and their internal generated revenue as well as the remuneration of elected and appointed office holders at different levels of government. It is not to be expected that the full facts would be gotten with such enquiries in a society marked by the opaqueness of those who rule over us.
I am quite sure though that much more than what we presently know would be revealed about the states actual capacity to pay and the mind-boggling amounts that the governors and their coterie of hangers-on pocket every month. This would also serve as a verifiable basis for insisting that there be a reduction in the salaries of these representatives of the people, as they claim to be. There is no reason, if actually politicians are elected to represent the people why they should earn more that the people they claim to be servants of. And as a reverend gentleman put it last week, governors who claim they cannot pay workers the new wages should simply resign from office!
We must insist that the wages of elected and appointed servants of the people must not be more than the average wages of those they claim to serve. It is only when political offices are not lucrative means for accumulating wealth that we can be sure that those who seek offices are really interested in service and not the feathering of their nests.
Second is the need for labour to be guided by a realisation of the class interests of the elites which have time and again been demonstrated so obviously. I found the piece on Monday July 25, by The Sun columnist, Uche Ezechukwu, who is by no means a radical, quite interesting and succinctly delivered. Discussing the deferred strike and the governors’ volte face, he mentioned inter alia: “stopping that strike through promises, which even a child on the street knows, would not be kept, is a most disingenuous act of self-deceit, which labour leaders should not have fallen for...the strike was shelved and the union leaders went home with an empty agreement that is not worth the paper on which it was scripted.”
Organised labour should have no illusions about sincerity on the part of capitalist employers or their governments which claim to represent us all. “Freedom cometh by struggle”, as a popular song we used to sing on the barricades goes. The same could be said of wage increments. “Let dogs delight to bark and bite”, it is thus in their nature and no less so is the nature of the elites and their governments to use any and every method they can to quench the fires of mass anger as much as to continue exploiting working people while they feed fat on the wealth created from the sweat of our labour. It initially seemed that organised labour was clear about this going by the title and contents of its July 17 press statement that “promises by the federal government and governors would not stop he general strike”. Calling off the general strike on the basis of “promises” couched as agreement, exacted a credibility deficit from the trade union movement before its constituency, the working people
Third is the need to look closely at the fine details of agreements with governments as much as trade unions do in collective bargaining agreements in the public sector. The agreement reached with the federal government, it could be argued, was as straight forward as it appeared. But a closer look at that reached with the governors reveals a technical gambit. The fourth item on that agreement which reads: “the 36 States agree that the effective date for the implementation of the new minimum wage shall not be later than 1st August 2011 provided that any worker who earned less than the =N18,000 between 1st April and the effective date of the implementation of the new minimum wage shall be paid arrears of the difference”, effectively negates the payment of arrears to all workers, even if the state governments had not reneged on the agreement as a whole. It might be pertinent to take note of such booby traps in subsequent agreements after the looming return to the trenches over implementation of the new National Minimum Wage Act, “comes to become”.
Fourth is the alleged “double speak” of the National Employers Consultative Association (NECA). In the midst of the mobilisation for a general strike last week, NECA had initiated a counter-mobilisation and equally incited the security agencies against the workers. This was presented as “a betrayal” by NECA on the part of the trade unions. It might however not exactly be so. NECA represents the interests of the capitalists-as-employers of labour. That it collaborates with labour as “a social partner” is not out of love for the working class or respect for its interests, it is merely to short-circuit the possibilities of workers’ power beyond the limitations of collective bargaining.
As a part of civil society, just as with labour, it tries to win the hearts and minds of the masses, particularly that broad spectrum of petty-owners, artisans and farmers that while being working people are not part of the core working class. It should be expected that as labour goes back to the drawing board, NECA will be more virulent in its counter-mobilisation. To undermine the hue and cry of organised employers, organised labour would have to build linkages between its struggle for minimum wages with a revamping of its anti-casualization campaign towards ensuring that there are more unionised workers in the private sector and thus more battalions of the working class for NECA and its affiliates to contend with within their own premises.
Finally, as the contrived deferment of the looming general strike is about unravelling, organised labour has to forge stronger ties between the trade unions, other working people and the broader radical civil society, beyond Lagos and Abuja. The battles ahead will go well beyond national general strikes. In each state there would most likely be pitched battles for the implementation of the National Minimum wage in truth and in deed, as the governors have already shown that they will twist and turn to get out of paying as is due at every twist and turn of organised labour’s struggle for this minimal improvement in the take-home pay of workers.
This is the time to properly institutionalise the Labour Civil Society Coalition (LASCO) united front as a genuinely national force for radical reforms and indeed as the late Chima Ubani, founding co-secretary of LASCO was wont of saying, and properly so; “for system change”. This is the way forward to turn the tragic-comic reality of the Nigerian working people’s life around, by breaking the shackles of exploitation and oppression with which the elites in and out of government bind us.
Comrade Baba Aye is the National Chairperson of Socialist Workers League
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