As one of Nigeria’s foremost, illustrious and renowned statesmen of his generation, a labour leader of legendary austere profile and indomitable repute, the late Comrade Paschal Bafyau (of blessed memory), was from all fair and objective accounts, a hugely talented, highly respected and beloved president of the most formidable labour Centre in Africa, the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC).
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The NLC president appears to believe that there is no alternative to the current capitalist system, its inherent poverty and inequality. As a result, he appears to adopt a nationalist position and all that he can hope for is that the Nigerian economy develops and that some of the extra wealth trickles down to the poor majority. This is despite the fact that, especially over the last three or four decades, the wealth that labour creates has gushed up to the tiny minority of corrupt leaders. They have succeeded in enriching themselves beyond their wildest dreams and so they don’t really need advice from the NLC or anybody else.
What the Lagos governor, and his colleagues across the country, wouldn’t admit or may not know, is that the Poor have learnt from the very hard realities of circles of deceptions of the ruling class. The Poor do not trust them and never do they trust the middle class who speak big, big grammar that are inconsistent with their daily life experiences.
The world of work can hardly be the same again. Smart work or hardworking? Homework or industrial work? Formal or informal work? We live to work or work to live? ILO centenary last year agonized about all the above questions but it takes an ubiquitous virus to compel urgent answers today.
For the avoidance of doubt, these activities normally take the forms of public lectures, rallies, peaceful protests and solidarity marches. But, this year, for reasons that are not unconnected with the unanticipated global prevalence of a tiny invisible enemy in the guise of Covid 19, all the above listed traditional modes of operation, would be painfully modified or completely punctuated.
“In making the foregoing categorical testimony against just the security personnel, one is not in any way, trying to shield the Kano state government from taking its due blame, far from it. On the contrary, reports from the fields by some independent observers, clearly implicated the government and its high ranking health officials, in the shoddy arrangements we saw, in trying to contain the rampaging virus.”
“Our governors, it seems do not really appreciate the enormous responsibilities of their offices. What they understand is the enormous powers they have, many of which they tend to abuse. We can help them to do their work by constantly showing their shortcomings, not become we want to deride them but because we want them to excel by offering them suggestions on what they should do to improve.”
“Until patriotic people begin to pose the question of power and the state as instrument of shaping society, we would continue to be wasting our energy in picking on the easy target for our criticism. Until patriots begin to think about the state as repository of power and begin to think on how we can wrestle that state from those misusing it, we will continue to have a revolving door syndrome of recycling old discredited people only to lament late how bad they are.”
“But in the many brushes the union had with the management, Abba Kyari showed a true character as a conscientious man, a true Nigerian patriot, by never failing to side with workers on the core issues of human dignity and fairness. Following our protest, he was the lone voice at the management meeting who spoke against the operation of two classes of canteen by the company. He was not afraid to state that having a uniform canteen for both management staff and junior workers was the only way to convince the junior workers that their meal was not inferior.”
“The famous Danish philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard said “There comes a midnight hour when everyone has to throw away his mask”. We have a military-contractor-political complex eating up Nigeria and masking as retired generals, businessmen and democrats in the day time. At night the masks are removed and all we see are desperate crooks. This is exactly what the Nigerian elite is. White washed sepulchers. They cover their rottenness with noise and flourish. They lie gratuitously. They smile without feeling and ruthlessly destroy our common patrimony to impoverish, miseducate, un-educate, and infect us to die. But they too die and all we have is a legacy of tribalism, corruption, bigotry and anomie.”