Following the prolong labour crisis that rocked the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) and defiled all resolution, after its national delegate conference, the General Secretary of the National Union of Electricity Employees (NUEE), Comrade Joe Ajaero and the President of the National Union of Petroleum and Natural Gas Workers (NUPENG) recently launched another labour centre, the United Labour Congress (ULC). Ajaero, who became the first president of the centre, spoke with journalists in Abuja on the move to get ULC registered. He also assured that the existence of the third labour centre will not undermine labour unity. SOJI-EZE FAGBEMI, presents the details:
With the launch of the United Labour Congress (ULC), there will now be three labour centres in the country: the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC), the Trade Union Congress of Nigeria (TUC), and the ULC. If eventually registered, what is the future of labour movement in Nigeria with these three labour centres?
Pre-1978, there were four labour centres in Nigeria, including the United Labour Congress, WHICH WAS then the United Nigeria Labour Congress. But during Obasanjo’s era, the labour leaders such as Wahab Goodluck, the prominent labour leader, were tried and banned from participating in labour movement.
With that dictatorial muscle, everyone had to be under a single labour centre. So it is not the culture of the Nigerian labour movement to have a single centre, but for the military. That is the last feature of the military dictatorship in the labour movement, the issue of having one labour centre.
The military then forced everybody together. This then came up again in ’88 when we had the democrats and the progressives, trying to split. However, because we were still under military dictatorship, the atmosphere for them to have their separate centres based on their ideological persuasion was not there. So, at the end of the day it took some years before this was achieved.
Incidentally, the same Obasanjo came again around 2002/2003 and saw that under democratic environment you cannot compel people to remain in one room even if they don’t want to be there. Even Section 40 of the Nigerian Constitution says that you have the right to form and belong to any trade union of your choice, as well as religion or political affiliation. So it is in exercise of that that the TUC was registered as the first labour centre with the number 001.
NLC does not have a registration number till date. In fact, in terms of receiving licence or certificate after the amendment of plural labour centres, they do not have that. Let nobody deceive himself, TUC is 001 and there is no 002 as at today.
In as much as I wouldn’t want to go into a controversy, the atmosphere has been opened for people to belong to labour centres with some criteria; which is to avoid mush-rooming of labour centres. The conditions include that there must be 12 industrial unions before you can apply for registration and part of the last features required for registration is that you must have a conference where you adopt a constitution and a name, as well as elect officers.
So we are not fighting anybody, we did not attack anybody, and we would not attack anyone. So what I am saying is that for the fact that we have three centres doesn’t mean that we cannot have four. And if we had four in 1978, when there were not as many companies and workers as we have today, these number of unions, then the tendency for us to have more is now. However, that does not mean that a worker’s problem is not a worker’s problem but the era of omnipotent labour centre is over.
So it is based on the service we can render to workers and I don’t see it as a disservice or minus to the labour movement in Nigeria.
Many are of the opinion that with the pluralisation of labour movement in Nigeria, workers would suffer more. For example, if there is an issue affecting workers which needs to be confronted together, government may deliberately brake the rank of the labour centres based on their different ideologies, leading to the collapse of such struggle?
I don’t think so. That is why I stated that there were four from the beginning. So why now pluralize? Pluralize to what? Today, what we have is three, they have not been pluralised. Even these three cannot even finish addressing the problems of the workers.
Since the unfortunate thing that happened in NLC in the last two years, I will tell you that nobody from my own group has the NLC attended to their problems. Nobody! Whether when we were picketing Ikeja or whatever, it is internal here. So, for you to now appropriate to yourself a power to attend to our problems when our problems are not being addressed, we will now have to look for a way of solving our problems and this is important.
So I don’t think it is pluralisation, but there is room independently for mergers and acquisition. If in the course we are registered and we are not doing well, we will be swallowed by a stronger centre or we have an arrangement with other centres to be one but not by compulsion. It’s like somebody issued a statement, you can’t go, and you can’t do this. You will not get much from this if the people failed to buy-in that we are together.
If there is an issue and we have divergent view, your ability to take an independent action makes you a strong labour centre. You saw the last fuel crisis, you people were there when I was lamenting, when we say we were not part of this, we didn’t sign this notice, but they moved on, they took their independent action. That is their independence. Now, if it paid well and they now get something better than what we got, it shows their strength. If they were the people that say they were not going to be part of this action, I and my group will take action; and if it (the action) doesn’t move the people who are leading this country to talk to us, it means we are not equally qualified to answer a labour centre, or to be referred to as a labour centre. So by the time we move one year or two years, and we discovered that we can’t do it alone, it is either we fuss together naturally. Nature will take its course.
The fear now is that even in a war, no war is won on battle field; you still need to come to round table to discuss and negotiate to resolve it. You have been on this issue, trying to resolve the crisis but to no effect. So why do you think that this is the right time for you to come up with another centre, considering the level of crisis leading to this decision?
I think we should stop being fixated. The solution to the crisis is what has happened. We have sat down, we thought in various ways about it. How do we do this? We resolved to forget about it. We discovered that even the people we are equally operating with will not agree on any of those issues we have decided jointly. We discovered that on daily bases, it is either they are sending Police, or EFCC or whatever to you to say you did this, or arranging some people from their own sector to send petition against you. That level of undermining you when you are together or when you want to be together does not help any matter. I want to tell you today that if I and Igwe are with the NLC, Ayuba can’t make a statement, he will not function. I am not trying to boast. And now the loll in the labour movement would have been attributed to internal wrangling. Let me repeat it. If I attend a meeting, he is there, I am there, Igwe is there, and we are all there with him, of course, we know him more than the people working with him now, on daily bases we may be carrying chairs and whatever. That will be a big disgrace to the movement. I have tried to apply this policy of staying away even after the conference.
He can’t mobilise more than me to have taken over the secretariat, but it appears people still don’t understand that we don’t want the collapse of the labour movement. I can’t see the current move as a way of undermining the labour movement. That is the only way we can have a solution; and I stated it, for me, after that strike, no phone call either from me to him, or from him to me, no meeting, we have not even by accident see one another but the movement must go on. The workers are suffering, we have to render services, so I don’t believe that it will undermine it and it cannot.
What is your ideology?
Workers’ centrism. The workers first, which means if the worker is hungry, it will affect us. If he doesn’t has any salary increase, it will affect us. First and foremost, there is no other thing that is bringing us to this business if not the workers. So, that is the ideology, that is what will drive us and we would resist neo-liberalism because it has killed jobs in Nigeria, it has killed a lot of people. When jobs are killed, people died. That is why we have to align with workers in the Aviation sector to ground Arik; and after that, even after 10 years of Arik refusing unionization, they signed an agreement that they have admitted unionisation and that the seven months salaries would be paid immediately.
Do you have the required numbers of affiliate trade unions based on the extant Labour law and have you met all the necessary procedures for registration?
I want you to leave that. If we are 11 unions and we want to register and the law says 12, they will not register us. Get this right because I know why I am saying this. If I know that it is 12 and I am going there with 11, you can see the foolishness on my part. It then means no one will listen to me. That is why I say we have to de-emphasize that area. But I am telling you, more than 12 unions left from the NLC, and I am telling you that unions from the TUC and unions that are not affiliated to any for now are into this. This is not a faction of NLC, there are unions from TUC, there are unions that are not affiliated to NLC and TUC and there are those unions from the NLC that pulled out, which I can count up to 12 or more. They now come together, to have a kind of mega arrangement to form this Centre. If somebody is saying it is not up to 12, you allow the people who are responsible to count and know whether those unions are registered or not; because it is the same organization that registered those unions that we are taking these names to; when they look at their records and they were not registered, they drop them. So, if we do this, I think we will be reducing tension. Some people said they are not up to the numbers or you are up to the numbers. Like I was trying to explain to you, this is not a faction of NLC having a Labour Centre, no! This is a mega arrangement, unions from the Trade Union Congress, whether one or two or four or five; union that were not affiliated before. The point I am making is that the unions that pulled out of NLC are enough to register. We didn’t go to register those ones that left from NLC as a Centre so the aim will not be defeated as if it is a faction. We have to align and start this process. So the NLC and TUC alone cannot be fighting us when we have people who were not aligned with any of the centres before. If NLC is challenging that NUEE is still its member, they can then write a letter to us that you are still our member and you cannot take that step, you don’t have the right. That is the area we can go to. Even if we are two or three, let them reject it based on that number. Like other conditions you asked, we are trying to present them, if there are other conditions that they felt we have not met, they can reject it.