Why Labour must take the lead
By
WISE counsel prevailed on the Nigerian Labour Congress (NLC) to abort its strike action planned for April 1. Will any strike action at this hour of Nigeria's economic travail help to feed the teeming millions of deprived and disadvantaged citizens of this country? Why has labour become so stunted in progressive ideas on social, economic and political development? Why has labour, like the Obasanjo government, become fixated to the defective tenets of so-called market economy and globalisation? Where was this private sector when governments started engineering development in all facets of life after a long slumber; merchandising being then the only aspect that attracted the business class?
One should have thought that an informed and patriotic labour movement would have by now led the Obasanjo administration out of its day dreaming and mental retardation. Who says the world is a global village? If so, why do Nigerians in their thousands fail to obtain visas to the privileged parts of the globe? Do you need a visa to move from one part of a village to another? What Nigerians want is not worthless naira. They want efficient transport services, free primary education, full and gainful employment, free medical care and industrialisation. They want cheap foods and shelter. Are these being pursued by the Obasanjo government? No. What is the solution by labour?
How can a people without basic infrastructural facilities think of gambling with privatisation; a phenomenon that has failed in Europe? It destroyed Britain and reduced it to a consumer until John Major jettisoned Thatcherism. Education, transportation, health and many other areas of national life suffered under Thatcher's free market. Reaganomics was a disaster in the United States of America until Bill Clinton came to rescue that country from trickle-down economics. It is this evident economic disaster that Obasanjo has courted since he turned full circle from state participation to a so-called free market. He has been heedless of the fact that even British, American and other European governments subsidise strategic areas of development to guarantee employment and prevent social unrest and insecurity, the products of idleness.
This is where the mentally docile labour has been guilty. Labour has lawyers, economists, historians, engineers, doctors, town planners, etc, etc in its rank. Has Labour been able to produce a model for Nigeria outside the ill-fathomed and half-baked privatisation and market economy? Has Nigeria any market aside from profiteering from the oil wealth of the Niger Delta, an area which successive administrations have carved up like a chicken? Edo Governor Lucky Nosakhare Igbinedion may seem unpopular with his people now, justifiably for owing on pensions and teachers' salaries. Yet, he has taken some laudable steps that should please any right-thinking voters. To build a fertiliser factory, a fruit-canning one and some two others is acting in the spirit of Chief Obafemi Awolowo, the great developer of the 1950s. It sounded strange that Obasanjo would go to open that fertiliser factory when the Volkswagen assembly plant at Ojo and very many others still lie fallow unutilised. Obasanjo travelled the world for a total of more than 360 days, yet failed to achieve any industrial breakthrough at the centre.
There cannot be economic growth without industrial development. Which is the service-based economy in the world that is worth its salt? Even Switzerland, the centre of money laundering, on its own, leads in the precision industry of all kinds. And this is where labour ought to play a vital role to stop the unbridled sale of what took longer than 100 years to establish to some few commission agents of the leaders of the last four military administrations.
Today, Nigeria is at crossroads. None of those gunning for power at the centre has offered any plan on how to revamp the economy the way Awolowo would have done. When one talks to people like Lateef K. Jakande, Bamanga Tukur and Ogbemudia, one finds people with original ideas and who are committed to improving locally. They will even put their planning within some time frame and build in contigencies. Let us look at the present fuel scarcity. There is nothing to blame the N.N.P.C for. If there had been good planning, the ordinary Nigerian would not know of fuel scarcity because there would be efficient train services, standard bus systems and ferry boats in some cases at their disposal. The common man didn't know of fuel scarcity in Lagos in the days when the state government operated a successful and profitable bus, ferry and rail services up till the mid-1980s. All these modes of transportation use other energy sources outside petrol. Most urban buses, not dilapidated minibuses that abound on Nigerian roads, use diesel. If we had proper mass transit, not the aberration we see written on minibuses, traffic congestion would have been cleared from Nigerian cities. Perhaps, the central government would have been making more money from oil because local demand would have been greatly reduced.
It is this hour that demands deep thinking that we waste money, billions of naira for that matter, on establishing television stations to propagate meaningless government policies of graft that have no multiplier effects in the presence of unemployment, rural migration and decaying public utilities. Yet, we shout from roof tops that we are apostles of small government , whereas in every of our moves we encourage overblown bureaucracy by creating corporations to duplicate each other or establishing parallel governments. Only Chief Olusegun Osoba of Ogun State and Chief Olabisi Akande of Osun behave like the Awoists we used to know, for example, in the South West today. They display extreme financial discipline and shun white elephants. Osoba gives industries incentives in Ogun.
However Otunba Gbenga Daniel may try to disprove him. Osoba, like Jakande and Olabisi Onabanjo, his professional seniors in government, is a cautious, experienced and target-oriented administrator. His AD counterpart in Lagos is a free-market economist. But give it to that young man in Abia State, Mr. Orji Kalu. He involves himself with the people and so one finds Abia transport service, "Abia this and Abia that".
Perhaps, it will be necessary to tell the story of Nigeria's industrial development of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s here. Until the late 1940s, the only known industrial project of great size was the plywood factory at Sapele, which was one of the largest in the world. Most of our produce left this country unprocessed. In the late1940s, the Unilever built a factory at Apapa to make soap and margarine. The Nigerian Breweries opened its plant at Iganmu later.
They made no significant impact on industrialisation until Chief Awolowo designed the Ikeja, Ilupeju and Isolo industrial lay-outs in the mid-1950s, even though he had established the Lafia industries at Apata, Ibadan, in 1952. The northern and eastern governments followed suit and at Independence Nigeria could proudly boast of many medium-sized industries. The trend continued, even with the presence of the military until President Shehu Shagari came to power. But since Ibrahim B. Babangida, there have been declivity and decay because of his policy of so-called non-government participation which the Obasanjo administration has now religiously adopted.
Today, we are a beleaguered country, taken 50 years backwards economically, politically and socially. Must labour be nonchalant in the midst of all these problems? It must now take the lead. One would have expected labour to agitate that the central government should build science laboratories and computer centres in federally approved economic centres for secondary schools and that mathematics, physics and chemistry be made compulsory in schools. How can a country grow without a physical science base? Labour must drive this home to government that money used in establishing T.V stations should go to building technical centres.
One would have wanted Obasanjo to declare Lagos, Ibadan, Benin, Enugu, Port Harcourt, Kaduna, Kano, Jos and Bauchi as federal centres. All these cities ought to be given special grants every year for development because they are economic centres. But we have people in government who do not see beyond their noses. They have misplaced priorities. Now they want to host the football world cup when they cannot run local league matches. How did we come to this sorry pass? Ask Shagari, Babangida, Shonekan, Abdulsalami Abubakar and now Obasanjo.
May 2003