VICE President of IndustriALL Global Union, Comrade Issa Aremu, has called on Governor Nasir el-Rufai, to “reconsider and withdraw” the mass sack of thousands of civil servants of Kaduna State and instead engage with workers’ unions to resolve differences.
Addressing the media after Iftar Ramadan breakfast hosted by him in Kaduna on Sunday, Comrade Aremu said “at times of Covid-19 pandemic, rising official unemployment of 33.18 per cent inflation and open unemployment of 50 per cent and footloose criminality and banditry, the minimum responsibility of all elected governments is “job retention, mass job creation and not engaging in unhelpful massive layoffs.”
Aremu said the proposed actions of organised labour against the mass sack by government of Kaduna State “is timely and legitimate”. He called on the Minister of Labour and Employment, Dr Chris Ngige, and his colleague Minister of State for Labour and Employment, Festus Keyamo (SAN), “to bring their wealth of experience to avert another round of labour lockdown in Kaduna State” through social dialogue between the state government and labour.
He urged state governors to emulate the administration of President Muhammadu Buhari who he said has retained jobs, while also creating some 1000 jobs in each local government just as he “ensuring the prompt payment of salaries including the new minimum wage notwithstanding volatile oil revenue.”
Aremu observed that the development in some states shows that “critical issues of development such as labour and policing cannot be left to the states but made “exclusively federal to foster justice and peace”.
Comrade Aremu, who was also two-term former Vice President of the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) and the immediate past General Secretary of National Union of Textile, Garment and Tailoring Workers of Nigeria (NUTGTWN) as well as Labour Party’s governorship aspirant in Kwara State, described as “least lazy governance” the act of shifting the burden of dwindling revenue on workers through layoffs.” He said it was time governors diversified their states’ economies through “government-private sector partnerships for massive industrialisation and varying labour absorption strategies.”
He noted that el-Rufai, like most governors of northern states, “was better positioned to be less dependent on federal allocations if they could partner with the federal government to urgently implement the Cotton, Textile and Garment (CTG) policy, which according to the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), could generate over 2 million direct taxable jobs.”
“At times like this, with pandemic, high inflation, unemployment, income and energy poverty, government protection is next to godliness. The constitution envisages a kind and caring Nigeria, not tough and insensitive sub-national leaders who sack workers on low pay, impose levies indiscriminately, worsen poverty and deliberately fuel violent crimes of various hues,” Aremu said, adding that there is a “nexus between job losses, wage poverty and criminality.”
“Men may suffer terribly from the death of loved ones, the breakup of a marriage, or some other personal tragedies. But what brings human beings to the point of immobilisation, total misery is the loss of their jobs. The truth about mass layoffs is that they’re killers. Just visit the communities hosting the collapsed textile mills around the country and see the misery of unemployment,” pointed out.
Comrade Aremu hailed the governor of CBN, Godwin Emefiele, who he said has “commendably turned Covid-19 tragedy into opportunities for supporting small and medium size enterprises, bailing out the state governors and creating and retaining jobs such that Nigeria is technically out of recession.
