The Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) has condemned the federal government for not dialoguing before making welfare decisions which tend to rob the masses to pay the rich.
Condemning the government’s failure to adopt social dialogue before taking certain decisions that bother the welfare and well-being of Nigerians in a democratic dispensation, the NLC, in a statement signed by its President, Comrade Joe Ajaero, condemned the move by the government to obtain a fresh loan of N500bn from the world bank to use as “palliatives,” from which huge sums have been calculated to end up in the pocket of members of the National Assembly and Judiciary.
The statement partly reads: “NLC strongly condemns the decision of the Tinubu-led administration to seek the approval of the National Assembly to obtain another tranche of external loans worth N500b from the World Bank for the purposes of carrying out a phantom palliative measure to cushion the effect of its poorly thought-out hike in the prices of Premium Motor Spirit.
“Remember that the U$800m, which was already proposed before the devaluation of the Naira by this government, was worth about N400b then but is now worth about N650b after devaluation. It is from this it proposes to bring out N500b for distribution.
“The proposal to pay N8,000 to each of the so-called 12 million poorest Nigerian households for a period of six months insults our collective intelligence and makes a mockery of our patience and abiding faith in social dialogue, which the government may have alluded to albeit pretentiously.
“The further proposal to pay National Assembly members the sum of N70b and the Judiciary N36b is the most insensitive, reckless, and brazen diversion of our collective patrimony into the pockets of public officers whose sworn responsibility is to protect our nation’s treasury.
We believe that this may amount to hush money and outright bribery of the other arms of government to acquiesce the aberration.
“It is unconscionable that a government that has foisted so much hardship on the people within nearly two months of coming into office will make a proposal that clearly rewards the rich in public office to the detriment of the poor.
What this means all this while is that the government is seeking ways of robbing the very poor Nigerians so that the rich can become richer.
“There is no other way to explain the proposal to pay a misery sum of N8,000 Naira to each of the mysterious poorest 12 million Households for six months which amounts to N48,000 and pays just 469 National Legislators have N70b or about N149m each, while the Judiciary has about 72 Appeal Court Judges, 33 National Industrial Court Judges, 75 Federal High Court Judges and 21 Supreme Court Judges and a total of about 201 Judges receive a total of N35b or N174m each.
If these other two arms are projected to receive this, what members of the Executive Council will receive is better left to the imagination of Nigerians, perhaps, the balance of N150b will go to them.
“These proposals are not just unacceptable to Nigerian workers but are also dictatorial and thus undemocratic. It is not a product of social dialogue which would have produced collectively negotiated outcomes by critical national stakeholders.”
NLC added, “We had thought that this government, given the circumstances of its emergence, ought to have been a stickler to all the preachments of the fine tenets of democracy, which would have shored up its image and begin to build legitimacy for itself, unfortunately, it seems to be in a hurry to abandon the remaining
pretensions to democracy that the previous administration left behind.
Furthermore, the actions of the federal government show that it does not have trust and confidence in the very Presidential Committee that it set up to take a comprehensive look at the consequences of the Petroleum Product price hike and make recommendations on the way forward to ameliorate its negative impacts
upon the citizenry.
“We reiterate that we do not have confidence in how the data for the never changing 12m poorest households was generated, neither do we have confidence in the mechanisms being pursued for the distribution of the cash transfers. The history of such transfers, especially the school feeding programmes even while the children were at home due to the Covid-19 pandemic and the Trader Moni saga, fills Nigerians with trepidation reminding us of the continued heist of our collective resources by those in Public office.
“NLC would not want to continue to be part of the usual charade of Committees with outcomes that are never implemented. We would not want to waste the time of Nigerians, especially workers on Committees that have already been programmed to fail and thus ignored. We do not want to provide a cover for the government to get away with the hardship it has imposed on the people. We do not want to legitimize impunity.
“As a result, if the government does not want to stop these fortuitous actions that it is pursuing in the name of palliatives, we will be forced to review constructively our engagement with the government on this vexatious issue and take matters into our own hands.”
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